This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on April 5, 2024.
On last night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra spoke with Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) lawyer James Manson about the latest regarding a police officer charged with discreditable conduct for donating to the peaceful Freedom Convoy of 2022.
He told the story of the police officer he has been defending for the past two years:
Now, constable Briscoe, in this case, was on leave. He was on unpaid leave, because he didn't want to take the COVID vaccine, and so they put him on unpaid leave. And while he was on unpaid leave, of course, the convoy came to Ottawa and he was very interested, he had nothing else to do at that point, so he was motivated to donate $50. And so he gave that through the online web portal... the regulations [under the Police Services Act] say that you can donate as a police officer as long as you don't donate it as the officer. So it can be Michael Briscoe, but not Officer Michael Briscoe. So ultimately, what happened was he did that [donated in his own name].
He explained how the fake news circulating about the Freedom Convoy at the time led an investigating officer to believe that Constable Briscoe donated to an illegal protest:
So what happened to them then was the cop got this information, they funneled it somehow to the Windsor police service, then it gets transferred to an investigating officer. In this case, her name was Sergeant Leah McFadden. Sergeant McFadden then goes into an investigation phase, and what she does is she downloads and she looks at 20 or so newspaper articles, and these newspaper articles are the ones that we all remember from back in the day, when the chief of police in Ottawa, and Premier Ford, Prime Minister Trudeau, all these official people were calling the protests illegal.
Some people referred to it as a siege, other people referred to it as lawless behaviour, things like that. None of that was true... so anyway, Sergeant McFadden, she reads these articles and she says, well, good enough for me. Everybody is claiming that this is an illegal protest, therefore, it's illegal. Therefore, Michael Briscoe arguably donated money to an illegal activity period. That was the extent of her investigation.