213 - The Case Against Bonnie Henry *UPDATE*

All right guys, today we are lucky to have the president of the Bonnie Henry fan club in studio. Kip, what's up man? Good to see you again. It's been a while. Can we start with for people who maybe haven't seen you before? I mean, you're pretty well known who've been spearheading a pretty big movement for us. Thank you, by the way. Maybe a quick 30 second recap of what you've done. Like in grade two language. Sure. And just for the record, it's not just me. It's obviously it's a team and they work wonders behind the scenes. I'd like to give them all a shout out right now, but I'm the executive director of a small nonprofit called the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science and Public Policy. We're just C-SASP for short. And we're a BC nonprofit and our mandate is published on our website, but right now and since inception, it's been to basically hold everyone accountable in government who was responsible for enacting those mandates relating to the lockdown. So that meant everything from the Declaration of Emergency, all the public health orders, the restrictions on public gatherings, social distancing, all of those things. We challenged all of that beginning with sort of the foundational premise, which was the Declaration of Emergency, which we got all the other measures. And so you're on the naughty list? We're on the naughty list for sure. Yeah. And that's not my main job. My main job is like I work in tech, but this is on the side. This is my civic work. And we commence to class action. I believe it was, I think it was early 2022. It's been so long. It's when we started it and then it was within weeks of doing so, we filed suit against the provincial government and Dr. Henry. There's been a lot of different legal challenges regarding COVID measures, but ours was different in that it was a class action. So it's not one person with a grievance about not being admitted into a restaurant or being able to go to church or places of public gathering or whatever. It was not like that. It was on behalf of an entire class of people, so a few million people, basically everyone who was affected by the COVID measures about the age of 18 at the time they were enacted. And it's entirely crowdfunded. I don't take a salary. The team doesn't take a salary. We're entirely funded by donations from the public. And well, actually the other side is crowdfunded too. It's just not voluntary, the participation. But that campaign began quite some time ago. We commence to class action on behalf of a couple of million people here in BC. And there was a kind of a hurdle, a hoop that you had to go through in class actions where you have to get what's called certified. So you bring an application to the court and the judge has to decide whether or not this should be able to proceed as a claim brought by many millions of people. Because that's what distinguishes it from a normal suit where you've got one or two people suing somebody in this case. You've got a lot of number of people. And so there's a test that's supposed to be applied for that. But that the class proceedings act is the legislation that enabled people to bring class actions. And so that was created back in, I think it was the earlier mid 90s by the NDP government, then NDP government. I don't know if it was my car court or who was the premier at the time, but it was introduced by the attorney general to solve a public policy or a social issue at the time. There was a problem with women's cosmetic implants. There was a lot of problems with how they were manufactured. There were a lot of injuries, there were even deaths in some cases. And there was a concern that that was going to jam up the court system if you had all of these people who had implants bringing suit against the manufacturers or whoever it was that they thought was responsible. And so this legislation was tabled so that you'd have sort of a collective avenue for redress. We're not the first ones to do that. Other jurisdictions have something similar. Ontario as a class proceedings act. We have a class proceedings act. But when that legislation was introduced, one of the reasons that the attorney general, the NDP government at the time, it was a government-sponsored bill. The reason why they, that they gave parliament wasn't just what I told you, but also to protect people from their own government that was in the parliamentary debates. Everyone's forgotten about that. That was the NDP government. So we use that tool and that legislation says you have to get certified before you can move on to the next step. So before you can go to trial, before you can deal with evidence, before you can put people on the stand and ask them questions and give live testimony. You have to get over that procedural hurdle. And the way the legislation is drafted by parliament is it's not supposed to be a difficult onerous step. But we knew that Crown was going to make it onerous and they did. To get certified. To get certified. It was very death by a thousand paper cuts. It's usually how they do up. And so we got our decision back. I think it was in late October of last year. The public was quite incensed with the decision that Justice Courier, our presiding judge, had released. There were, it was very long. It was 144 pages long. You don't normally see decisions of that length, but he sat on it for around two and a half years. I don't know exact amount of time, but it was a significant amount of time. But for some decisions, like the thing is that there's no requirement that says a judge has to issue a decision within X number of days or months. There's some jurisdictions where there is a requirement, not in BC. I don't know of anywhere in Canada. And because of that, you know, this court backlogged with other cases, we had to wait to an half years and we had no control over that. For certification. Exactly. To decide whether you can proceed with the class actually. Exactly. Why? Okay. So then did you get it? We did not. And the reasons that he gave, and again, there are 144 pages. And so I'm not going to be able to synthesize all of them. But in a nutshell, and there were a bunch of reasons. He felt because Crown had convinced him, which is Dr. Henry's lawyers, that this case was too big. In fact, he described it as the largest class action in Canadian history. That was his own words. He kept it on describing it as large, large, large, large. And I had some time to think about that. And I'm not really sure what he means by large. Maybe I'm an engineer and so precision of language matters. I thought it mattered in law, but it matters a lot less there. Because large can mean multiple things in litigation. Because that means the amount of documents that are produced. Because the court sees patent cases for some pharmaceutical company that you release to drug that hurt people. And there's millions of pages of documents. There's lots of cases like that or litigation with the CRA. There's been many instances where there's been entire warehouses of documents that potentially would be produced. So I don't know what he means by that. That shouldn't be a barrier to justice. If he means in terms of the number of lawyers that are needed, maybe there's something to be said there. But there's no rule that says you have to have X number of lawyers in order to go to court. Some people don't have any lawyers at all when they go to court. So what does it mean by large? And I think what he unconsciously was saying was that he was really talking about the magnitude of the government's interests that were at risk of being displaced. Of course. And that's not a valid reason to dismiss an application for certification. The test is set out by parliament. And it's not a long test. There's been many interpretations of that statute over the years. But anyone can read it in less than five minutes. It's not long. But the problem is that whenever parliament creates laws, they don't explain all of it about how they should apply any given circumstance in the British tradition that's delegated to judges to interpret. And that's sometimes where the problems start, right? Because judges, they don't like to see themselves as public policy makers, but for centuries they have been in kind of a less obvious way. That's just how the common law is. And Crown went a great length to try and make the law. the statute, the interpretation that the judge should apply, be much more complicated than it really was. And so one of the things that they said was, look, because there's a, you have to be a suitable representative plaintiff, like that represents this class of millions of people and obviously our stakeholders are happy with our work. But I don't think it would have mattered who was the proposed representative. That would have been an issue for them. And so the, the statute does say they need to be suitable, but it doesn't really define what that means. And so Crown took that to say, well, they don't have enough money, right? They don't have enough money in order to prosecute this, to bring this all the way to trial. So you should just throw it out. What? Yes. And it sounds absurd. But the obvious danger with that is just forgetting COVID stuff. Just imagine there was something else that happened, like say there was a defective product recall or some cereal that had arsenic in it and lots of people were dying. The manufacturer could just raise a defense. Look, we've killed so many people that this, the mess is too large that we shouldn't be held accountable and the plaintiffs, they don't have the resources to bring a large multinational to account. Are victims don't have enough money? Are victims, yeah, the victims don't have enough money. And so that's a problem, right? Because one of the reasons why the class proceedings act was created was to facilitate collective access to justice. So there's been this problem that's been going on for centuries where we have elected representatives who make laws. But the laws are, they're not complete until a judge interprets them. And then there's a lawyer who also wasn't elected, who's explaining how that law should be interpreted. And so they become alexicographer. They tell the judge what the word reasonable means in this context. So there's always been that vulnerability in the system. It's not perfect. There's some good things about it, some bad things. But the bad things is what they leveraged in the situation to try and dismissive. That wasn't the only reason. That was the main central one in my view was just that this is too big. There were a lot of my inbox was jammed up and people were calling and so you weren't even given the opportunity to go to court and present your case basically. Exactly. But he was evaluating things on their merits. For example, he said that Bonnie Henry is immunized from any liability. That's not an issue that an application judge should be determining on certification application. That's something that should be punted down the road to trial. He's just supposed to determine whether we meet the task for certification, not whether we're correct that she's done something wrong. Right? So there was an issue of like advocacy here. So they wanted to really nip this in the butt? Yes. Is it nip in the butt? Nip in the butt? I'm not sure. What I'm like, you know, like, and the thing is it's like, why did it take two and a half years? Because the decision, even if it was a correct decision, it didn't need to be a lawyer. It could have been 30 pages and the decision could have been the same and it could have been released within three months. And there's case law now, especially in England, where we've all heard that expression just as delayed as just as denied. But you've now have judges who are confirming that in their decisions that they have a three month rule in England. Anything longer that and they say it undermines public confidence in the judiciary, commercial confidence in the business community, just the public, everyone loses faith in the judiciary because you don't have any certainty of what you can and can't do or what someone ought to be doing in the world. If you don't have access to timely decisions, someone's got to make a decision right or wrong. But if you sit on it for two and a half years, but I think that was not an accident. I think I'm not going to say that the court is corrupt, but I does feel that the decision was the outcome was predetermined early on. And the reason I think for the two and a half years was strategic because we all remember what it was like a couple of years ago. Like it was madness in Mayhem and the streets. People were getting arrested. There were riots. There were protests. There were police trampling over people on horses. It was a pretty insane time. Like there were a lot of unhinged people on both sides of the fight. That was a concern for me because that's one of the reasons why we brought this suit. It's like we're cannot supposed to be a civilized society. If we have a problem, then we have avenues for redress. We don't need to resort to riots. That's what the government tells us at least, right? And so this could be a useful pressure release valve is rather than people starting fights or trying to do something harmful to a public official is we go to court. I think the reason why they took two and a half years was not because it required that much reading and thinking. I think it was because the risk of civil unrest at the time that we were in court was significant. And I don't think there's anything controversial about that. I think the government's lawyers would agree with everyone knows that it was a time of mass civil unrest and releasing a decision like what Justice Carey really did. Released at that time would not have helped. It would have dumped gasoline on the fire. And it's well known in the bar that public confidence in the judiciary is not doing well. I was actually just reading a paper on that before I came here. It's been going down over the years. And so you release a decision like that at the climax of public sentiments and it's not going to help. And what they thought they could do was wait until everyone kind of forgot about it and public sentiments attenuated and then you kind of mitigate that risk of everyone's move on and everyone's move on. And the economy is racked down everywhere so people can't contribute and donate whatever it is that they need to do because that's just life. Yeah. I think the world is even crazier than it was then. Yes. Exactly. Well, they're like, okay, if we announce, sorry, no, we're not going to let you go to court a few years ago. Yeah, people would have freaked out. They would have freaked out. Yeah. So now it's like, we release it quietly. Yes. And people are, I mean, are people paying attention? Some people. Some people are a lot of people who are very anti-locked and don't even know about our work. We found out recently we had been shadow band. It appears on social media. No. That's funny. It ties me. But that kind of makes sense because I meet people the time who get really angry when they find out about our work because they're like, why didn't I know about this? How long? You know, looking at your status updates, your website, like I just found the kid Carson interview from, you know, 2020. Why am I just finding this now? And I'm just like, I don't run the Silicon Valley tech companies. I don't know how they moderate and how those algorithms work. I'm a software engineer, but I know that human beings have their fingers over the levers and knobs. And I don't know who those people are. They never talk to us. But if you haven't heard of us, it may not be an accident because we have an audience around the world, right? In Germany, in the UK, in Australia, the United States. We have people calling us from Texas. No surprise. So if you're in this country and you haven't heard of us, it's probably not an accident. Damn. So this has come out. What's next? I mean, what can you do next? We have an opportunity to appeal it. And you have to start the appeal process within 30 days of that decision. So that window has already come and gone, but we started that process in time. That first step is just, you don't really have to do much. You just basically giving the other side notice that you're going to bring an appeal and refile this form and court. It's not very complicated. But the actual substantive work of analyzing his decision and picking it apart, all the problems that are with it, that goes into what's called your fact or written submissions, whatever it is they call it in the court of appeal. But basically it's your argument of everything that he did wrong. And that takes time. That takes a lot of time to, like a good lawyer in a case like this, even like two weeks is short runway. Our deadline to file that was originally the 30th of last month of April. It got punted down the road by month because both sides needed additional time. And there were some, one of our counsel had a personal matter to attend to. And so that worked out well by coincidence that we have some additional runway. But that's the 30th of this month, which is for those listening, it's right now. It's May 2026. What's the date? I think it's the 10th. Yeah. On 9th. 9th. Mother's Day tomorrow. We've come in the studio late at night on the night. Exactly. To record this emergency podcaster. Well, so we have to fundraise. We have to fundraise in order to see this through to the end because people need to understand that this decision is permanent unless it's altered. That's the way common law jurisdictions work, because you have a decision and this idea called stair decisis, it's Latin, it just means that the past decisions are binding on a court. Like, there's some nuance to that, but in this case, this is a decision that is favorable to the government's interests and they will hop on it. And it's already breaking things in the world that you wouldn't expect. I saw recently there was a gentleman who was being sued by RBC and our decision came up and court, it was cited. He, I think he had borrowed some money from the bank for his business, some kind of a loan and I'm assuming he, it sounds like he defaulted on it and the bank went after him and he said, and if it hadn't been for the lockdown, having all of us living through it, we might have found this to be kind of a spurious argument. He said, look, I had a business, but it was in ruins because of these public health orders. And the judge cited our decision saying, you can't blame Bonnie Henry, she's immunized. And so that's what I mean is that that decision, it's going to break all kinds of things in the world that it will always come back to haunt people forever. This, because this is the kind of decision that the government needs in order to rationalize any absurdity that they do in the future where there's an overreach of executive authority. And not just for COVID. It could be anything and it doesn't matter where you sit on politics. If you're sympathetic with indigenous rights, it will come back to haunt them. If you're sympathetic with people who are more on the right about asserting property rights and things like that, it's going to come back to haunt them. It may eventually even come back to haunt the government itself, right? Because right now the BC government is going after some pharmaceutical companies that were involved in the fentanyl crisis, right? If I was a corporate council for those companies, I would be instructing like BC council to you may want to look at that decision because they're saying we've created such a mess in the province. And we can argue that the DC government doesn't have the resources in order to see this through. They're broke, right? So this any number will break everything for everyone. And if that decision is left to stand, it's going to cause a problem. So this is our last avenue for collective redress. And I'm saying that not metaphorically, but in actuality because there's a law in Canada called the NBC called the statute of limitations. It's similar in other jurisdictions. It's basically a clock that starts ticking as soon as you know or you could have known that you might have a claim that you'd like to bring to the court. And a BC, it's two years under the limitations act. And once that clock has expired, that's it. There's been cases. There was one years ago, there was this family whose loved one had been killed in a correctional facility that it was caught on camera and the correctional staff had actually murdered the inmate. So there was no controversy about who was responsible for it. But they brought their claim just like a few days after the two year window had expired. And the judge was very sympathetic and he said, I have to throw this out. Like I can give you what you want, but the other side is going to appeal it and the win. So the statute of limitations is like the system's broom, right? And this is the last thing that's in the system that's collective redress for everybody. So once it's gone, that's it. There's no going back. That decision will be binding forever. So we have to see this through, we have to see it through to the end. Otherwise we can't complain later. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's just I'm sweating. I'm just, I'm having like PTSD. Hey, it's kid, shout out to the friend of the show Nicole Gilmore, one of the lower main lens best real estate agents. She's awesome in a week. As a single person, listing house, it's a little bit intimidating because there isn't like the other person on your shoulder to ask questions or advise or collaborate with soon. Nicole was super instrumental in helping me focus and on the tasks that needed to be done. And she kept me moving along. And as my accountability coach towards listing actually did move the process along and it got to a place where we could list. And I'm so happy with the result. Gilmore real estate dot C.A. I didn't mention this, but throughout that time, Justice career are periodically would write us and opposing counsel as well saying, you know, there's this new decision that's come out from some other court somewhere in the country. It might have a bearing on your application that's before me for certification. If you'd like to make submissions on it, you're welcome to do that. And so sometimes he would start that process. Sometimes we would find a new judgment that was helpful for us. Sometimes crown would bring it to his attention. And this went on like I think there's at least six instances where he asked for for basically more information on how this might be relevant to his analysis and the parties cooperate. But every time that happened, like it would delay things further. So he'd say, you know, I'm going to have my decision I expect within the next month and half, two months, whatever. And then just before that time had passed, he'd say, by the way, you know, I just drown this new decision and, you know, and then pushes back another six months. But when we read his decision, there was very little of that post certification analysis, the feedback that he needed all these other decisions that was actually contemplated in his decision. So that's my theory that this was a stalling tactic that isn't totally without any grounding. But yeah, it was frustrating. It was frustrating because to have everyone was like, this decision didn't need to be 144 pages and it certainly didn't need to take two and a half years. Okay. So like what happened to this point? You've got to raise. So we have to raise. So originally we thought we needed 70,000. Turns out we don't need transcripts of everything that was said to the judge for this. That saves us some money. We need to raise around 50,000. It's not a lot. I've seen people raise significant amounts for other campaigns that affected far fewer people. Oh, you've seen GoFundMe's for-- And that's where we are. We're all GoFundMe, right? Are you okay? Yeah. Can I put that link in there? You absolutely can. Yeah. I'm not going to put that link in there. But our problem is that a lot of people don't know about us. Some people know about us, but they are lacking confidence in the judiciary. And I can appreciate that. I can definitely appreciate that. Nobody's really saying that we've done a bad job or anything like that. We always take criticism seriously. People have constructive criticism. It's rare. Most people actually really support what we're doing. But you're the only people doing this. Because class actions are complicated. And I have-- Were there other people also wanting to file a class action? Yes, but they don't really understand how to do it. Because most of the people, when they were upset about the lockdown, they were upset about specific grievances that affected them. I think I may have mentioned this actually last time I was here where a body of mine, he was upset that he couldn't go into strip club. Another guy was upset. He couldn't go to his church. He also was upset that they couldn't go to Canadian Tire to pick something up. Somebody else was upset. This one was me. Couldn't see Dune in theaters. Everyone had their own grievances, right? And I told people, look, if you want a solution for this, you have to put your individual grievances aside and think about everybody. That's the only way. Because there's no one demographic that wasn't affected. Everyone was affected. Even if you were rich and you had a private chat, you probably, when you landed somewhere, I still had to submit to the rapid antichin testing or something like that, right? Everybody. So, if everyone is affected, then everyone should bring a class action. That's what this tool is for. But trying to get people, like we're not, I would say our followers are across the political spectrum. They're all large portion on the right. The left tends to think more collectively, the right tends to think more about individual issues, things that affect you personally. And there's a time and a place for both of those in different issues. But for something like this, you can't think at an individual level. Everyone was being screwed over, right? And it was very hard to get people out of that frame of mind where they couldn't stop thinking about themselves. Because people do that in dire times and emergencies. That's just how people are. If you're in a car accident, your building is on fire. You're thinking about yourself. But unfortunately, that's just how most people are. So in a situation like this, when people wanted to litigate, and there was a lot of people wanted to bring. legal challenges, they were doing it in the wrong way. So they were challenging on technicalities and the rules. A lot of people were bringing what was called judicial reviews. And it's a type of procedure in law where you're challenging a government's decision, right? And that's not, you're not supposed to be challenging policy measures normally through judicial review. And people basically were challenging things that were downstream rather than the cause. So for example, they didn't like an order that prevented them from public gatherings at places of worship, right? But that that order was predicated on a declaration of an emergency. But they were just so fixated on what happened at their church. It's like, no, as long as you don't deal with the declaration emergency, the judge is going to say, yes, but there was an emergency. So they had to do that, right? And the win. And that's that's what happened. I told people this a lot of people didn't listen, but that's what happened in all of those cases is they didn't challenge the underlying declaration of emergency. It's like a tree, right? You've got the root and you've got all these different things that are predicated on the base. And so you have to challenge the base. And by the way, it's up to Todd Maham thinking about that one judge that came out and said that Trudeau did break the law by issuing the Emergency Act. Yeah. No, it's good. Have any effect on anything? Well, it's good that you raise that. I think that was one of the decisions. I don't actually so the most recent put note in that narrative, that saga postates the release of Kriara's decision. But it's important that you raise that because yes, there have been success to those who say there's no hope at all in the judiciary. I would rebuff that by saying, actually, we have enjoyed successes. There have been successes, intermediate successes, some more technical than substantive. But there's some very important ones like in Alberta, for instance, all of the public health orders, the chief medical officer issued, were struck down as ultravirus. Ultravirus means, is from Latin, it means no power, basically, the laws of no force and effect. And all of them were struck down, not because there was an issue with the policies themselves, that they were far reaching, or they weren't supported by science or anything like that. But it was a technical victory because cabinet was issuing those orders or was kind of shepherding the chief medical officer, Dina Hinchaw, into issuing them. And they don't have the legislative, parliament hasn't given cabinet the authority to do that. That's what the chief medical officer is for. And so all that technicality, all of those orders were struck down. That's good, but it's not this sub-Nalberta. Yes, that was in Alberta. So all the mandates that were handed out in Alberta? Yes, we're all struck down. We're the world illegal. Yes. So people who are getting in shit for, and people can bring claims now for like if they're businesses, all those damages that they they they suffered, they have a claim now. And the clock will restart from the date of that decision. That's usually how it works. That's when the world has been put on notice, you know, statute of limitations. It looks like the government broke the law before that it was falling the law. So it's great, but it's on a technicality because it's on a technicality. It's on a technicality. It came from the wrong people. It was on the basis, I mean, how could they make that mistake? It's so silly that well, the way the government, I wasn't there at the hearings, but if I read their fact and it probably would be fog of war type arguments, everything was happening so fast, it was all in flux, you know, we did the best we could. We might have made mistakes. But you know, we did what was we thought was necessary based on the best evidence that we have. And like obviously we know now that a lot of people in government did know better. It's all it's all bull. It is. But so that's the thing is basically the orders were on the wrong letterhead. And so they're all struck down. And sometimes like that's often the only way that you will have a victory is by looking for those those that technical minutiae of did the decision maker have full evidentiary record did they look at this document and so on. And so people are trying to challenge substantive public policy through technicalities in the law. And that's what judicial reviews do. But at times, but that's really not the right tool. Because you don't get discovery in judicial review discoveries where the other side both sides have to hand over all their documents, right? Judicial review, it's much more limited. And so I knew that if we're going to do this right, there's so many incriminating documents that have come out. We need to see all of them. And plus my team has constantly been getting an influx of documents from the public. And we can't do anything with them until we get into discovery, which happens after certification, of course. Which you were turned down for exactly. And so they don't want the they don't want that. They know you're going to bring the exact and that's the thing is that class actions they require certification and certification has to happen before discovery. But that's one of those things where it like I was telling you, the legislature when they created this the class proceedings, it doesn't say anything in there about discovery has to get punted down the road. That was something judges created and a lawyer convinced them at some point in time that this is the way you should do it. It's in the interest of justice. It will say court resources. It's fair for everybody, whatever. And so they use that against us because we obviously we have a lot of incriminating documents. You should know that. It's so smart. Telling it, but that's it's the drawback of doing class action, right? It should have walked in there. Telling it is kind of acted like you kind of didn't really know what you're doing. And they would say, Oh, this will be fun. Let's just bring this guy to trial. Then suddenly you show up and yeah, well, I mean, like that's the thing is everyone wants to put her on the stand and ask her these questions, right? Yeah. And now you don't have the chance. Unless we prevail on the field. So if you get 50 of your fun rays enough money, 50,000, 50,000, you can appeal. And what are the chances? Yeah. What would you say? Like the appeal in layman's terms? I mean, listen, let's be honest, your IQ is a thousand times bigger than mine. I can't even believe that you know, you led this team to this point. It's unbelievable. You know, I don't know how you you're gifted. It's kind, but like I can't I can't predict that. No, what I'm saying is to explain it to me like I'm dumb. This is how it works is you have. So it's a new judge. In fact, there'll be three of them. There's a panel of them. They're all pointed by the government. That's just how it works. That factor you have working against you, but appellate level courts frequently overturned decisions of lower courts. This happens every day. That's why you have appellate courts and why you have separate judges. We've identified definitely mistakes that he made in his decision. So there's there's different. There's in order for for a decision to be reviewable. Some some reason why an appellate court essay. There was definitely a mistake made is it comes down to one or two things. There's either an error of fact or an error of law. In errors of law are more significant and we have grounds in both of those when he makes a mistake that's an error fact. It has to still be material. So there's what's called the overriding palpable and overriding is the language in the courts. Palpable means like you can see that there's a mistake, but overriding means that it was actually significant that it determined the outcome. And so we've cataloged quite a few and some of them we've disclosed on our status updates on our website, but there's more that we're uncovering. You don't want to show your whole hand. We don't want to show our whole hand because it's not just because we're trying to keep her powder dry, but I could be wrong, right? We may find out doing more reading that actually there was this case law that said, you know, that's not an issue or something like that. But there were yeah, we've got quite a bit that we can take to the court of appeal. Now, my prediction is that the BC Court of Appeal likely will say that mistakes were made whether or not those mistakes were of sufficient gravity to change the outcome that I can't know, that I can't know. But if you don't go, you don't file that we'll never know when we're logged in with the $50,000 is not a lot of money. I've seen people in the lockdown movement, anti-lockdown movement spend significantly more than that on other things. And, you know, like if you distribute that over all of our fans, but that's the problem is that when your shadow band people don't even need know that we're doing this, we don't have a big marketing budget, right? Like, I'm an engineer, I don't I don't manage your social media or anything like that. It's really not what I went to school for. So, we're good fighters, you know, we do the combat, I think effectively in court. But when you have an army, you still need to provide it with beans and bullets. Otherwise, you can't do its job, right? Even if they're willing to do the fighting. And so that's kind of where we're at, right? Yeah, yeah. Damn. And so you got to raise this by what date? Very soon. So they are, it's, I think he says the ninth or 10th today. Yeah, ninth today. So it's the ninth today. Our fact, him is due on the 30th. We need, I would say to do it well, I would like to give our council enough runway at least two weeks. So that's not a lot of runway. That's not a lot of wrong. We don't have to raise it all immediately now. If we can raise it over the coming weeks, that gives our council confidence. And she's been very, very reasonable on her bills, very reasons she's not doing this. to get rich. This is the kind of work that will prevent you from getting rich. - Oh yeah, any lawyer that would take this on, you're getting a big target in your path. - Exactly. - It's like you had a target in your back. - Yeah. - I've had a bit of a target on my back in the past and I'll probably get a target on my back for even having you here today. - Yeah. - Thanks for that. - Yeah, well, you know, it's very rare that you see any progress or change in history that where someone wasn't offended. That's just history. - Yeah. - Because you always have some vested interest that stands again by keeping things the way they are. And we're obviously trying to change things and the government's not happy about that. But we have always been a credible threat to them. We were not, you know, - Like the Bonnie notes your name. - Yeah, I mean, like it was only one case that she mentioned. I think I mentioned that. Maybe it was last time I was here, where I think the CBC didn't interview with her years ago. It was just on Christmas Eve or I think it was around New Year's and they were asking her if she had any New Year's plans and she said something along the lines of like, you know, she was gonna keep the champagne on ice pending the outcome of the class action. And at the time, there was as far as I know, there was only one, so that was us. - Almost felt good. - Yeah, it was good. It was creeping in her dreams at night and making her sweat a little bit, you know? I mean, - Someone from, you know, the Department of Justice or the Attorney General's Office and provincial attorney general's office probably had a meeting with her and said, this guy we might not want to have with. - Well, they do that anyways, but they hadn't seen anything like this, I think, coming. They knew that there would be lots of legal challenges and I'm sure there's a large pile of internal memos we'll never see from the Attorney General's Office advising them that, you know, there could be a significant number of legal challenges. But I don't think that they were thinking that they would see a class action challenging the underlying declaration of the emergency itself 'cause most people, they just don't think like that for one and two, most lawyers wouldn't have thought to do that either. They would have wanted to do something narrower, but even if they had prevailed in that and one demographic is able to go back to one specific church and one specific municipality, it doesn't really have a huge effect for all the rest of us or four million people. - If you raise the money, let's say you win the appeal. What is the dumb down version of what you want to happen? You go to court, the trial happens, everything gets put on the table. - Yes, everything gets, it depends what the decision the court of appeal makes, but the court of appeal has the authority to change basically any order that justice career has made. I'm kind of simplifying this, but in this situation-- - Yeah, simplify it, please. - In this situation, they can substitute their own discretion if they choose to if the certain test is met. And if that happens, they can say, they have options on the menu. One of them is they can say, we think he made mistakes, we're pointing out those mistakes, and we're remitting it back to the application judge, it could be him or potentially a different judge to reconsider our application for certification. Or they can just say, to hell with it, we're just going to, it's in the interest of justice that we just substitute our own decision, right? - I can go to trial. - Yeah, well, as soon as you're certified, the next step is discovery. They'll still try and fight us and so on, but it would be much harder for them to do that once we have a decision from the Court of Appeal, 'cause the Court of Appeal, they have the decisions that they render of greater authority than the lower court, the Supreme Court of British Columbia. But if another option is we don't win in the Court of Appeal, and if that happens, there's still a potential avenue for redress in Ottawa, we would go to the Supreme Court of Canada, you have to ask permission, you don't have an automatic statutory right to go on appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, you have to ask permission. And there's a test to be met and it's kind of vague, but basically things that are in the national under-astidant class action, challenging the COVID measures that affected millions of people. It might be, it would meet that test, but there's other considerations that apply before you can get into that gate. But I think that we do have a chance in the Court of Appeal, and if we can get there, really our problem isn't capability, we have some very good counsel that can work on that file, in particular, Lerlia Polina Fertula. She's been amazing to work with. The public has been very happy with her work. She's worked in this file with professionalism, it's been incredibly difficult to do, but she's done an amazing job. And we have other counsels as well, Omar Sheikh, and others who can assist, 'cause it an appeal is a big job. It's, you know, more than all of this seems like a very big job, a very large job. It is, it is. It is, and when I was in the military, we used to call it as asymmetric warfare where the one side has all the resources and the other side doesn't, but you can still win. You can still win. That does happen. What are your thoughts on? And I've honestly been tapped out in doing other things, being a dad, you know, focusing on the things in my immediate world. Well, I'm trying to keep my finger a little bit on the pulse of what's been going on, obviously, but this new virus that's going around. - I think it's a heptivirus. - You have to virus. I just started hearing about it in my algorithm like a couple days ago. - Yeah. - And I'm like, "Oh, how long has this thing been around for?" And like, if they're already setting up something else happening, and this trial is still going on, and they're gonna implement some of the same tactics if they even dared. I mean, I don't want to be stupid. I think too many people are awake now, I hope. - Well. - For them to do that again, but then you're already into another virus fight while we haven't even solved - Exactly. - how the last one was handled legally or correctly. - There's been zero accountability. - Yeah, what are your thoughts? - Well, my thoughts are that Bonnie was actually on the CBC. This is very recently. I think it was in the last month or two. I think it was on the morning show on CBC. - How do I miss that? - Yeah, exactly. - You know, great way to start your end. - How do you entire country miss that? - Exactly. - Yeah, so she was asked by the anchor, you know, how do you think the, words to the fact of basically, how would do you think the world would react to if you had to do this again, like if there's another virus? And her answer, I don't remember the exact words that she gave. I listened to it a couple of times just to make sure I heard it correctly. But basically she said that the public would be expected to comply again. So that tells you and then with what you were just talking about that they have not foreclosed on repeating all of this. And if we do not have closure on this case, and like I said, this is the last avenue for collective redress, then when it does happen again, and I'm telling you it will, we can't complain, we can't complain. 'Cause we let it happen. And $50,000 distributed over four million people, it's not a lot of money, right? - Yeah. Today's money is constantly losing value. More gets printed, purchasing power is dropping, and over time your savings by less and less. You'll see it at the grocery store. If everything you own is inside the system, you are exposed. Banks can restrict access. There's lots of videos online of people trying to withdraw $10,000 cash. They're harassed by the banks. It's insane. So like what are you doing? Golden Silver gives you a way out. These are real physical assets that exist outside the system. It's just value. They can't be printed. They've stood the test of time. They hold purchasing power. Everyone's talking about this. It gives you real control. You own it. No permission needed. There are two ways to feel safer that I've used and would endorse and recommend to you. The Salmoney wallet is a platform that you buy physical metals online, $5 here, $100 there, whatever feels good. It's stored in a military grade vault, waiting for when you need it. Of course you can ship it to your home, three days, FedEx. You can even sell it back and have the cash immediately put back in your bank account if you need it. Millions of people are feeling uneasy about leaving their savings in the bank. Salmoney wallet is a great solution. Another strategy is you can move your RRSP into Golden Silver. Remove the risk of market crashes. Maybe even be pleasantly surprised with a sharp rise in the value of silver if so many experts are predicting. So give yourself something most people don't have. Real control, real security, real peace of mind. Find more of how I do this at kidcarsen.com/gold. All right, well, they make a big deal about, you know, this is a crowdfunded campaign. But it's always theirs, right? Yeah, we're all paying for it. Exactly. We're paying for the people that we're abattling against. And you don't even know how much they're spending. You can find out roughly how much they raise, but you don't really know where it goes. We're pretty transparent. People can look at our books. You can, everyone can go on the GoFundMeBag to see how much we've been raising. And she's been making an issue about that. She, you know, like, body wants us to reimburs her for. for illegal costs. I don't think that's going to succeed 'cause the, yeah, I mean, when parliament drafted the class proceeding exact, like they said, if you don't get certified, the presumption is the other side doesn't get costs. They don't get reimbursed. - So she's using our money. Like, - Well, she never paid anything out of pocket. - Yeah, they're using tax money. - Exactly. - For their case. - Exactly. - And then they want us to pay back the money that she took from us. - Some portion of it. - Right. - Which they're going to exaggerate into some massive monolithic figure. But the problem with that is, remember what I said about why we didn't get certified? It, one of the core reasons that they gave. So right now, she's saying they have deep pockets. Look at their GoFundMe page. They've raised half a million dollars. And it's like, that's true, but that's over the span of like five years. It's not a lot of money, especially the team's not taking a salary, all the administrative stuff, insurance and phones and hosting email. All of these things, it's not a lot of money. Like no nonprofit runs off of that. So there's a conflict of narratives because we didn't get certified. She was saying we don't have the resources. Right. And now she's saying we have deep pockets. So which one is it? Right. Her council has a duty of candor to the court to not mislead it. So do we have some secret stash? 'Cause I'd love to know where it is. Right. And we put it towards this appeal. But this is the kind of stuff that I have to deal with. It's just, when I go in to court and I'm listening to what's going on and I see their arguments, like I hear circus music in my mind. It's like, it's kind of a dark comedy, like a Monty Python skit or Saturday Night Live, Mad TV or something like that. And they're in costumes or wearing suits. And it's just bullshit. And it's not just some lawyer. It's like that's supposed to be an advocate for the public interest. That's the attorney general. That's our lawyer. That's their publicly funded, supposed advance the public interest. And the things that they would say about our stakeholders was appalling at times. Like we had nurses running out of the courtroom during the certification hearing 'cause it was like PTSD being dramatized, you know? Like you've been mugged or raped or something horrible has happened to you, your victim. And then your abuser is up there in front of a judge basically telling you that you deserve debt and you did all these things wrong. So they were running out. I saw a lot of it and it was hard. It was hard on me 'cause like I'm an engineer and I'm trying to do this. I can't be everyone's therapist at the same time. But that's what was happening, right? - Wow. Yeah. - Wow. Oh, dude. Okay, well, I know you don't want to be here all night. I know you got plans. So I'll put the link to the GoFundMe and the-- - I appreciate it. - Get a couple clips for Instagrams so people can share it around. So if you are listening to this, go to my Instagram page, find one of the clips from this interview. Share it with your groups. I guess if you're a part of a group, there are a lot of like still like WhatsApp groups and single groups. - Time's people, you know? - Yeah. - There's thousands of people in there just spread this around. - Yeah. - And yeah, we can't let this not be followed through. - Soobony.ca. - And then just click on donate and you've got lots of different options. - Okay. - Lots of different options. - Brother, Kip. Thank you, my man. - I appreciate it. - Thanks for, thanks for sticking with it. 'Cause man, it's just exhausting hearing about it. - I can't imagine-- - We got it. I don't like to give up. I like to see things through to the end. Even if you fail, just finish which you start. - Yeah. - That's where you start. Let's see where this goes. - All right, I'll do. Thank you for coming in. - I appreciate this. (upbeat music)