Will Dove 0:00 Recently Alberta became the first province to rule the COVID mandates illegal. In the case of Ingram vs. the Government of Alberta, Justice Barbara Romaine ruled all mandates illegal on the basis of a misuse of government jurisdiction. The fallout of that, so far, has been that many COVID fines have been dropped by the courts. Lawyers Leighton Grey and Jeffrey Rath, working in cooperation with the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, were instrumental in that decision, and to this day, remain the only lawyers in Canada to question a provincial Public Health Officer under oath. But there has also been a great deal of misunderstanding on this landmark decision, with many believing that all Justice Romaine did was set us up for future violations of our rights, as she did not rule the mandates violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this in depth interview, Leighton Grey walks us through the case, the pivotal moments, and explains exactly what Justice Romaine’s decision means, as well as the possible, even probable, fallout for the Alberta government. While he admits that a future misuse of Justice Romaine’s decision could potentially be used against us, he also explains why he believes that possibility to be exceedingly unlikely, and why, as a result, Alberta at least is now armed with the legal ammunition to resist future lockdowns. Will Dove 1:37 Leighton, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show. Leighton Grey 1:48 Thanks, Will, it's great to be here on the show. You know, it's been about two years since I first met you. And I've been following your everything that you do. And the incredible growth of your operation is a testament to the hard work that you're doing and the great work that you're doing, but also to the very great need for truth in media, that you are meet- are meeting on behalf of all Canadians. So thanks for doing what you do and doing it so well. Will Dove 2:13 Well, thank you, Leighton. That's very kind. We want to talk today about the Ingram case, which, folks, for those of you who don't know, some of you have heard about the victory where Judge Barbara Romaine ruled that the mandates in Alberta were illegal. Now we're gonna get into the details of why because it's very important. But what you may not realize this case has been going on for a very long time. You started this case in December of 2020... Leighton Grey 2:37 Right Will Dove 2:37 ...on behalf of Rebecca Ingram who owns a gym here in Calgary, and she went after the government for shutting down her business. So I'd like to back up and let's start right at the beginning. At what point [unintelligible] did you hear from Rebecca, what was the original suit that was filed against the government? Leighton Grey 2:53 Yeah, so back in those days I was representing... in the case I represented a group of churches and a lady named Torry Tanner, and we were arguing on behalf of violation of religious... churches. So this is going back to the latter part of 2020, when sort of the second wave of restrictions came in, the really severe ones, business closures, church closures, and so on. There's a lady, the Ingram whom you accurately described and she was represented by Jeffrey Rath. She's a gym owner, she ultimately lost her business. We went to court in December of 2020. I'm glad that you started there because this is really important for people to understand. The original application was something called an injunction. An injunction is a court order, which basically asks the court to tell a party to stop doing something, because it's going to cause irreparable harm. And so we went to court December 2020, to try and get the governor of Alberta to stop doing what they were doing, because we said it was going to cause all manner of irreparable harm. Courts... History has proven us to be right beyond our wildest and scariest expectations. But it's interesting to note here that in December of 2020, we presented before the court at that time, before a judge named Kirker, who is now, has now been elevated to the Court of Appeal for Alberta. We basically presented the same case that we presented at trial. We had one of the world's most renowned epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who gave his expert opinion on the harmful impacts of lockdowns, and in his evidence was evidence about the Great Barrington Declaration. We had Colonel David Redman, who is maybe the foremost expert on emergency responses policy in Canada and one of the leading authorities in the entire world. He's gone around the world to help design these policies. So we had all that evidence. All of our case was presented to the court in December 2020. The other side had nothing. They had literally had Dr. Hinshaw file an affidavit saying, well, we have to, we have to do this war, everybody's going to die, and it's going to overload the health care system. And the court simply took judicial notice of something called the pandemic, took in, in the absence of, of really any scientific evidence, denied our application for an injunction. And the proof that they had nothing, that they had no evidence is this: the court actually granted them until July the first of 2021, so that's basically seven months, to produce their evidence, to produce their case, because they didn't produce it in the injunction application. And, you know, in a way we went over that period of, of six months or so, the lawyers for the governor of Alberta, essentially, you know, took apart, tried to torpedo parts of our case, a series of applications striking out parts of our claim, striking out certain evidence, they won all of those, they ran the table on us through all of those. So that was the early part. And then, as we got close to the trial, with a scheduled trial in September, we lost Justice Kirker, because she was elevated to the Court of Appeal. You can call that a coincidence, if you like, but we, she left and entered Madam Justice Romaine as the trial judge. Will Dove 6:16 Now, you made the statement about judicial notice. So please correct me if I'm getting my definition wrong here. Judicial notice is when the court accepts as fact, something that's asserted by a third party without any supporting evidence. So when they said they're taking from Deena Hinshaw, that there's a pandemic that's going to kill everybody under judicial notice, they didn't ask for any proof of this. Leighton Grey 6:40 That's correct. And the other aspect about judicial notice is that it's rarely if ever open to a court to take a fact as proven on judicial notice where that fact is in dispute. In this particular case, the court took the main fact in dispute, took that on judicial notice in the absence of any evidence. In fact, not only did the court take judicial notice of the fact that was clearly in dispute, the court took judicial notice being presen- having been presented with substantial evidence to the contrary. So it was a very, I think, improper exercise of judicial discretion, but one that, unfortunately, in the COVID era, courts were very ready to make. The same thing happened in British Columbia with the boudoir case, same thing happened in Gateway in Manitoba, and also in the in the companion case in Ontario. And it's also significant to note that the Supreme Court of Canada still wants nothing to do with any case on COVID, denied leave, to appeal, to hear any of these cases, and which is very, very strange. And again, is another example of of the exercise of judicial discretion in a way that doesn't serve Canadians because the the task the court is supposed to exercise, our Supreme Court is supposed to exercise is, is the issue that's being brought before it [unintelligible] of national concern, it seems easy to check that box and or is it a novel area of the law? Well, that one is perhaps making even better argument on that one. Notwithstanding that the Supreme Court of Canada exercised it's it's supreme discretion not to hear any of these cases which actually impact every single Canadian. Will Dove 8:27 Now, [unintelligible] I have to cover this in greater detail because this part continues to stun me even three years in. The courtroom has their Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the top epidemiologists in the world, one of the original authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, his testimony against that of Deena Hinshaw, who's an, you know, at the time was a Public Health Officer of Alberta, whose entire medical experience was two years internship in family medicine at the University of Alberta. And yet the court does not even consider Dr. Bhattacharya's testimony, questioning her assertions, they continue to take this on judicial notice. Is there any rational explanation for this? Leighton Grey 9:13 I think the one that you would have to, you have to make if you're going to sort of give the benefit of the doubt to the court, is that they were frightened. And it's important to note, you know, the courts in Alberta, were very much in lockstep with the government. In fact, the the chief judges of our courts sat down with government, sat down with Dr. Hinshaw, and there was no place no other place, public place in Alberta that was more locked down than our courts. And so the the courts of our province took these restrictions very, very seriously. The part of it was fear. The other part of it, and I'm going to grant them a little bit of leniency here, which sounds strange coming from a lawyer to the judges, but it did place the court in a very difficult position in terms of being in the midst of an uncertain, you know, quote unquote public health crisis, to put the court in a position where they're sort of armchair quarterbacking, what, you know, what the government's policy was doing. However, countered against that is this: when we went and asked for the injunction, we didn't ask the court to vitiate, or set aside what the government was doing. What we asked for was an injunction, an injunction that would prevent these or would stop these lockdown measures from continuing to prevent them from causing irreparable harm to every aspect of society, until we could take more time to study the issue, and study some of the other alternatives that the Government of Alberta never even looked at. So in the big picture, it's hard to be sympathetic, or to regard what the courts did here as rational. I happen to think that it's the role of the judiciary constitutionally, to make these types of tough calls. You know, the singsong phrase that we heard repeatedly, from every single one of these judges is that, you know, they're not scientists, they can't be asked to be the arbiters of science. But in this particular situation, that's precisely the job that they had to do if a case comes before them. And the key evidence in the case is scientific evidence, which by the way, is not unusual. It will happen all the time, for example, in medical negligence cases, or in cases involving engineering disputes, or involving patents, scientific patents. This happens all the time where courts are presented with expert scientific testimony. And they make decisions, they make a decision based upon what they think is the most persuasive scientific evidence before them. But every single court that these cases came before refused to do that. There wasn't a single one that looked at at our science our side of the case and said, Yeah, I've listened to Jay, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and I dismissed everything that he said, even Justice Romaine didn't do that. She simply said, well, I'm not going to look at it. That's not my job. I trust what Dr. Hinshaw said, she was doing her best. And so that this is a serious, serious problem, because, you know, these people are unelected, they're appointed, they're appointed essentially out of the Prime Minister's office in Ottawa, and they're given incredible power, maybe more power than any other person in our country. And yet they seem unwilling to do the job that they are required to do. And that is to assess evidence and to make rational decisions, as you say. So I would say that the response of our courts to COVID cases, for me has been extremely disappointing, and to the point where, you know, I and other lawyers who have argued these cases have lost some faith in the judiciary in terms of being a watchdog, as being a part of our political structure, constitutionally, that will uphold the Constitution, even the case where the government is passing laws and bringing laws into force, that are harmful to to Canadians, and in particular, in violation of individual rights and freedoms that are entrenched in the Constitution. Will Dove 13:23 Now, the major turning point in the case, at least from my perspective, came when you and Jeff got sworn testimony from Deena Hinshaw, and you and I did a detailed interview on that not long afterwards, so I don't want to go too in depth. But at the time, I was extremely impressed with the questions that you and Jeff crafted. Because you really set her up to the point where it didn't matter how she answered them. Something was going to be a follow up from that. And I'm going to be asking you to remember those questions, and possibly you can't at this distance, but if you can, or at least the gist of them. Please tell us what those questions were that Deena Hinshaw was asked. Leighton Grey 13:59 Right. So I had the the bulk of the job of cross-examining Dr. Hinshaw, and I did it at considerable length. I think we had close to four days of testimony. I think I had three of the four days and Jeff had some very specific sort of hard hitting things that he went after at the end, but instruction, the cross examination of some like Dr. Hinshaw, you know, I treated her as I as I would an expert witness. So these people tend to be very smart, very well educated, in her situation, she's very used to speaking in public, she's very used to answering questions. However, her weakness or Achilles' heel is her arrogance. And you saw this in every single one of her press conferences. I went through all, there were over 400 of them, and I went through every single one of them, not only did I watch them, I actually read the transcripts and made notes on them. So what I did is I laid out a scenario in which she would have to go one of two ways. Either she would have to defend her violation of charter freedoms, and we would go into deeper questioning on Section One of the Charter. Or she would disavow responsibility for what she had put into those orders, and pass that that responsibility off on to the Kenney government. When I had prepared for the questioning, I thought that the second scenario is one that probably was only about a two and 10 chance that she would go that way. But when we reached that fork in the road, to my astonishment, that's precisely what she did. She threw the Kenney government under the bus. And she basically said, she adopted the Nuremberg defense where she said, you know, I was, I was just following orders. And she said, basically, that these orders were not hers, that even though her name was on them, that essentially she was getting all of her cues and all the content for those orders from from the Kenney cabinet. And in hindsight, this should have been really obvious to all of us. It should have been really obvious that Jason Kenney, the way that he operated his government, really in an authoritarian dictatorial style, much like Justin Trudeau, it should surprise no one that he never had any intention whatsoever, of handing over the reins of government to a health bureaucrat. So it became very clear through the, through my, through our cross examination of her that she was a willing participant in this, that she was set up as a straw person, she was set up as somebody who would take who would take the fall, who would take the bullets for the Kenney government and to insulate them from blame. And it worked for a while. It worked for a long time. But when we were finally able to question Dr. Hinshaw, of course, this is when we got to see behind the screen where the wizard was speaking into the megaphone, and we and there we saw Jason Kenney. And he was exposed and I don't think it's coincidental that the trial had a lot to do with Dr. Hinshaw being fired, fired, but also ultimately, in the demise of Mr. Kenney, as our premier, at least we like to think that it had that impact. Will Dove 17:03 Yes. Which brings us to the decision not long ago by Justice Barbara Romaine that found the mandates illegal, but not on the basis that they were unconstitutional. So [unintelligible] explain what was the basis of her decision? Leighton Grey 17:18 Right. So backing up a little bit, the situation that we had in Alberta was somewhat unusual and distinct from other provinces in that, that because of what I said earlier about what the Kenney plan was, it rather than follow the the Emergencies Act, the emergency plan that was set by that was provided by Colonel David Redman in 2014, before he retired, which would have been a declaration of a public emergency, which would have had different reporting requirements with different disclosure requirements, it would have required the government to go back to the legislature to report to them, to even debate some of the decisions about what they were going to do. They chose to declare a... do something that was unprecedented, and that is to declare a public health emergency for the entire province. We have a recent example of how the Public Health Act is supposed to work. And that is with the, you know, the current E. coli outbreak that's happening in daycares in Calgary. There, what's happening is the Chief Medical Officer of Health is taking control of that situation. But that is a localized health emergency. That's really what the Public Health Act was designed to do. It was never designed to have all the reins of power handed over to a health bureaucrat like Dr. Hinshaw. And the reason why the Kenney government did that is because of what I said about the process that they wanted to set up. So that informed our approach to presenting the evidence and the argument in the in the Ingram case, and it may discourage people to hear this, but we knew we were always going to lose on the Charter argument, the Charter argument, the body, the corpus delicti, had been put in the ground in Manitoba because the Manitoba Court of Appeal had already ruled on that. And so there was no way that Justice Romaine was going to do anything different than what the Manitoba Court of Appeal had ruled. And that is essentially that, even though all of these really serious, unprecedented, extreme, flagrant violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, even though they all occurred, they're all justified because, you know, the pandemic pandemic was an existential crisis. We were all going to die, we have to save the health care system. And so all that was justified under Section One of the Charter. We actually knew even though we fought really hard, we presented a lot of argument on that Charter argument we were we were reasonably assured that that was going to fail. And part of the reason why we did that tactically, was because we wanted to draw the intention of the AG lawyers, the Alberta lawyers away from the jurisdictional argument and get them to focus on the Charter argument, which they were very confident that they were going to win. But we had this other argument, this jurisdictional one, which basically said that everything that the Chief Medical Officer of Health did was illegal, all the orders were illegal because she exceeded her statutory authority. So when we come to the decision, we get this very strange process. And that Justice Romaine, she, really her decision should have been about five or 10 pages. But she goes on for another 80 pages talking about the Charter. In my respectful view, and I've said this before, and in fact, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and I wrote an op ed that was published in the National Post on this, it was not only superfluous and a complete waste of time, it was improper, because it misled anyone reading that decision about what what the case was really about. There's no purpose. In fact, it's kind of futile. It's a futile exercise to consider the constitutionality of illegal laws. And but Notwithstanding that, she went on for 80 pages. And I think the reason why she did that is because she wanted to provide cover to Dr. Hinshaw, what she did was she did through basically blowing her up as as a pristine witness which she wasn't, but also to provide cover for the Alberta government. And unfortunately, that, for many of the people who have read the decision or heard about it, or seen reports of it from the leftist media, they're left with the impression that, you know, that this is this wasn't really a loss for the Alberta government, and that, you know, the loss was on some sort of a technicality. And that the real substance of the case was all about, you know, the Charter. And if the Governor of Alberta had just done things differently, then then you know, you know, everything would have been okay, that's not true at all. That's a distortion and even a perversion of what the case says. It's really, really important for people to understand that what happened was, Jason Kenney and company made changes to the Public Health Act, to make the Chief Medical Officer of Health the most powerful person in the history of Alberta. And even though she was given unprecedented powers, undemocratic powers, actually, to the extent that the wording said that she could use any means necessary to fight the pandemic. And she did. She even exceeded that power. And the importance of the decision is this, first of all, that every single one of those health orders was illegal, all of them, because they all followed an illegal process that was dishonest, which it was designed to deceive Albertans. That's a really important point for everyone to consider. Secondly, it should restore us in notwithstanding what I've said about the courts so far, it should restore some faith in the judicial system, in that a court was finally prepared to say to a government, look, if you're going to give yourself these enormous powers, and you're going to even exceed those, and it comes before us and you've exceeded those powers, we're going to tell you that, we're going to tell you that you've exceeded your authority. And the court did that. And this is extremely important. The other important feature about the case that that has escaped, you know, notice of some people is that it has had the effect of essentially making invalid and illegal, all of the COVID tickets that were so much the subject of the news and that you reported on so that people like the whistle, you know, Chris Scott and the Whistle Stop Cafe, you know, the pastors Timothy Stephens, James Coates, and others that, you know, Ty Northcott and the Northcott Rodeo, the Bowden Rodeo, all of those cases fell, in fact, many, many cases fell on the basis of that. And there's one more really important point that I want people to consider. And that is under Section 66.1 of the Public Health Act. One of the things that Mr. Kenney and his government in his cabinet did when they started monkeying around with this legislation in the early part of the pandemic, is they actually created a section section 66.1, which said that it disqualified and prohibited Albertans from suing the government on the basis of, you know, harmful effects of any of the lockdown orders. Well, this is a key part of the decision, because the court found that every single one of those orders was invalid and illegal from the get go. Section 66.1 does not apply. Section 66.1 only protects the government from litigation and from lawsuits in the event of an otherwise valid health order. We don't have any valid health orders. We only have the effects of illegal health orders. And so that is why Jeffrey Rath and Rath... of Rath & Company Calgary has actually started a class action. And the representative plaintiffs in that action are Rebecca Ingram, the lady you spoke of, and also Chris Scott of the Whistle Stop Cafe. But any person, any one listening to this, or any Albertan who suffered harm in terms of financial harm, loss of business, loss of job or anything of that like, can participate in that class action. And I can tell you the Alberta government is very, very concerned about this. And they are not regarding Ingram as a favorable decision to the Alberta government whatsoever. But I think what we have with the Ingram case, and the way it's been reported, is we've had these, you know, these distortions. It won't surprise you, Will, to learn that the first media outlet that reported on the decision was the CBC. I suspect that they had advanced notice of the decision before anybody else because they had a reporting out within an hour. In fact, I found out that decision had been released by reading that completely misleading CBC report, which focused completely on the, and were focused almost entirely on the charter part of the decision, which is of no legal moment or significance whatsoever. It's, it's simply, Justice Romaine going off on a little bit of a legal education tour, with the essential part of the decision being what I've said, and that is that all these health or- orders are illegal, not only the ones that were covered under the Ingram case, but all the subsequent ones. They're also the ones about the vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. They're all just as illegal because they all follow the exact same process from start to finish. So I just want to finish on this point. Because it ties into something that you talked about, and that is the delay in the case. I believe strongly that the Kenney government knew that these orders were illegal from the get go, that they knew that from the very beginning. And that is why they adopted a strategy to delay the case as long as possible, and to protract the period of time, during which they could keep Albertans under these lockdowns. And this was all by design. And I can't go as far as to say that the courts were complicit in it. But I can say that whenever the Alberta government asked for time, asked for adjournment, they got it. And as you know, there were several junctures where this occurred. There was one those particular embarrassing in September of 2021, we were supposed to open the trial at that time, and the province was was actually not locked down at that time. We got notice that Dr. Hinshaw was unavailable, because new restrictions were coming in, in vogue. And, of course, we learned very shortly afterwards that she actually took the specific days off that she was supposed to testify in our case, and she claimed unavailability, but she took those days off as holidays, where she was away from the office. So that's an example of the type of thing that went on, the shenanigans that went on during, you know, during this case, and I have to say the court at various times was abusive towards counsel. The Justice remain actually put, I believe it's in paragraph 282 of her decision. She described abuse of cross examination of Dr. Hinshaw. Well, I don't understand what she means by that. I can't think of any time any question, and you can go through the transcript if you like, where I abused Dr. Hinshaw. I think she abused us. I think she abused the truth. But I don't think that Albertans, I would think that Albertans would expect lawyers like myself and Mr. Rath, who are really, in a real sense, representing every single Albertan been locked down for more than two years, I think they would expect us to be and to ask tough questions, and to not let Dr. Hinshaw off the hook, or to go in there and serve, you know, give her, you know, a soft touch. That wasn't our job. We were in there, and we had a difficult job to do. And our job was to ask tough questions, and to cause her to give answers, to provide answers to Albertans. And, you know, it's significant to note, Will, Alberta is the only province in which a Chief Medical Officer of Health has actually been required to do that. And so I'm very proud of the work that we did on the Ingram case, it would have been great if we'd won on the Charter issue, too. I think there is a solution to the Charter problem, the way judges are interpreting it, that I can talk about. But on the whole, the thing I want people to understand is that Ingram is a win for Albertans. It's not a win for the Alberta government, it creates a huge problem for them, because it exposes their, the, really, the illegality of the Kenney government, which, you know, we all came to understand, which is the reason why he's no longer our Premier. I think it does send a message to the current government that look, if you're going to behave in this fashion, you're going to be held to account. But that's sort of the long and the short of the of the Ingram decision as I understand it. Will Dove 29:43 Right. Which leads to several questions, the first few which are for clarification. You were talking about the class action suit. So are you aware, before we even get into that, are you aware of anybody still who has outstanding fines from the COVID mandates or have they all been dropped? Leighton Grey 30:02 There actually are a few cases. I just, I was at a speaking engagement in Calgary just on the weekend. And there are some people who are actually still going through the machinations of some of these prosecutions. But what is inevitably happening is when they go to court, and the prosecutor sees the whites of their eyes, they end up folding the case. But there actually are Alberta prosecutors still trying to get convictions in these cases, which to me is nothing short of reprehensible. It's a complete deception of, on the Alberta public, every si... because all of these tickets are based upon health orders that are fundamentally illegal. Their void ab initio, that is from the very beginning. So I don't understand why any of these prosecutions are ongoing. But I understand there still are a few out there. Will Dove 30:46 So anybody out there who's in Alberta who's watching this, who has a fine, still pending, they should push it through, they should take it to court, at which point in time they're going to drop it. Leighton Grey 30:57 Right. Will Dove 30:58 Okay. Leighton Grey 30:59 Well, I think if they let the court know about the Ingram decision, I think that'll be, that's the ace. Because I think [unintelligible] if they let the prosecutor know, because I think there are prosecutors out there who are simply preying upon the ignorance of the public that, you know, people are presumed to know the law, that's one of our basic tenets of, of law, because the law is out there, it's known, but the truth is, it, that, you know, unfortunately, a lot of this information is being censored. And you know this well, what's happening with, with, in our country right now, a lot of people are relying upon platforms like Facebook to get their news. And it's sort of they're actually many people have never even heard about the Ingram decision. And in fact, you know, the mass media, the legacy media didn't report on the case at all, except at certain times when it was favorable to the government, for example, they made a point of reporting on the decision that I described in December 2020, on the injunction that went in favor of the government. And, and the legacy media reported that, you know, on the decision that or the part of justice remains decision, which said that everything, all the charter violations, were okay. But everything in between seems to have escaped the notice of the legacy media, which is really unfortunate. And it's it's part of the reason why there are people out there, as you say, who are facing these tickets, and they have no idea that a huge landmark decision, maybe the most important decision of the 21st century in Alberta has been released, and they don't know anything about it. Will Dove 32:29 Now, in regards to people who lost businesses, lost their jobs, lost their homes, and you got a class action suit, how can they get involved in that suit? Leighton Grey 32:37 Well, my good friend Jeffrey Rath of Rath & Company in Calgary, he has founded that lawsuit. And the way that a class action works is that unlike other lawsuits, there's a stage after the case is filed, called certification. And during the certification phase, the Court essentially determines if there's a case there that is worthy of proceeding to trial, which is a low threshold, but after the case is certified by the court, then other people who want to get involved and be litigants in the lawsuit, they can register to be part of the class. So I'd recommend anybody right now who's hearing this or listening to this to cont- to contact Jeffrey Rath at Rath & Company in Calgary, and they can record your name and address and contact information so that ultimately you can participate in the lawsuit. The lawsuit is being led by by what are called representative plaintiffs, these are people who put their names on the lawsuit, and they sort of do a lot of the heavy lifting for all the other litigants. The class itself can be many hundreds, 1000s, even 10s of 1000s, in fact there's some class actions have involved millions of people, for example, in product liability type cases. So anyone who has suffered harm, who fits within the class of plaintiffs that's defined in the lawsuit, will be able to participate in that class action. Will Dove 34:00 Given the change of government, that we no longer have, thankfully, Jason Kenney since he's been replaced with Danielle Smith, how much pushback are you expecting on this lawsuit? Leighton Grey 34:09 Well, I think that the Alberta government is going to have to defend the case. Because, you know, the situation is it puts the Alberta government on the hook for many millions, perhaps even billions of dollars, depending on how the extent to which you know, the case grows. They don't have a rational defense to it. But I still think that if they follow the the sort of playbook that governments and large corporations often use, they're going to protract litigation, make it very expensive for the case to go forward. And it is essentially grind, you know, grind the case to a halt if possible. I am a supporter of Danielle Smith, I believe that she's doing a lot of good things for the for the province. However, if I were looking at at her, you know, better government by way of a report card, I would say that in certain subjects she's doing very well, but in others, she needs remedial work and study. Her record on COVID right now thus far is not very good. And she became the premier, because the previous premier really screwed up on COVID. And as part of her leadership campaign, she made some very pointed promises. And she distinguished herself from other candidates for the leader on the basis of things that she said about COVID, both before she ran for office, and during the campaign. She has not yet lived up to any of those promises, we have not seen significant changes, any significant changes in Human Rights Law, in the Public Health Act, we have not seen significant changes at Alberta Health Services, we still have a Chief Medical Officer of Health, which to my mind is an office that is completely redundant, and should be done away with entirely. We don't need one, we've seen the harms that this can cause handing over this type of legislative power to an unelected bureaucrat, who really has no ability, no background and no wisdom to govern Albertans, generally. So there are a lot of problems. And I'm I have to say, I'm quite disappointed with the approach of this government thus far has taken to COVID. They've made the mistake. And I think if they don't change course, it's going to cost them. But they've made the mistake that many governments in the western world have done and that is they've tried to sweep COVID under the rug. You know, some jurisdictions, obviously New Zealand, our Prime Minister, Dr. Tam, and you see what's happening in United States, a lot of jurisdictions are simply lying to us about what would happen with COVID. Our Prime Minister is actually saying even even though the the internet record is very, very clear in number of speeches, he's actually telling us that he didn't force anybody to get the vaccine, which is, would be laughable if it wasn't so heinous and so deplorably untrue, but of course, this is a man who invites 90 year old Nazis into our House of Commons to to receive standing ovations and shakes the hands of warmongers like Mr. Zelenskyy, but these are other topics. But coming back to our current Premier, I do believe notwithstanding what I've said, that there are going to be significant changes to the law. And I don't think that Danielle Smith will risk locking down Albertans again, because for her that would be political suicide. Albertans are not, I don't believe the vast majority of Albertans are going to have this, but having said that, you know, on her scorecard right now, she really has not done anything about COVID. We don't even have the Manning Report that we were promised. The Alberta government has a supplementary report, they've not released it. They promised to release the Preston Manning Report in November of this year. And for those who don't remember this, the, early on, in fact, I believe it was last year, not long after she was elected, you know, the Premier set aside $2 million and created a a Provincial COVID Inquiry Commission that Mr. Manning impaneled, I believe there are five other people on the panel to study what the Kenney government did during COVID 19, and to submit, you know, an authoritative exhaustive report with recommendations. I suspect, having talked with Mr. Manning and having read his paper called The COVID Inquiry, that he's going to make some very pointed recommendations that are likely to include even prosecution of certain government officials who are involved in obvious wrongdoing. I mean, there are certain members of the, you know, villains of the in the Kenney cabinet, which the electorate got rid of, these are people like Kaycee Madu and Tyler Shandro, you know, tapes and others that we simply did away with got rid of them. Copping is another but they were people responsible for managing portfolios, like, like justice and health and education, and, you know, business and commerce and tourism, which did tremendous damage to Alberta, long standing damage. We're living through the, you know, the damage that Dr. Bhattacharya warned about when he presented his evidence in 2020. And he talked about something called a trickle down epidemiology where these lockdown harms actually hurt the least advantaged, the most vulnerable people in our society the most. And that's exactly what's happening right now, as you go around Alberta, and you see tent cities everywhere, rising inflation, rising interest rate- interest rates, people trying to deal with carbon taxes, which are blatantly resulting from, you know, debt that's been racked up on, from things like serving COVID spending, you know, all of these are harms directly related to policies that came out of COVID. And really, you know, the evidence was there, that these things were harmful. And there are other jurisdictions that didn't do them. You know, countries like Sweden, places like Florida and then they're not dealing with the same after effects the way Alberta and the rest of our country are. Will Dove 39:55 You made reference to certain public officials, elected officials possibly facing criminal charges. Now I realize that you're not a criminal lawyer. And like if that happened, what would you surmise the criminal charges would be? And what would the potential penalties be? Leighton Grey 40:11 Well, it's my view that what we're dealing with in COVID is a very serious breach of public trust. And the individuals who are responsible in these ministries actually caused serious harm, and death, rises in suicides. People right now are just waking up to the harmful impacts of these vaccines. They are actually causing serious harm and death. And we, of course, we cannot go all the way down the line. We can't prosecute every single health inspector who went out to, let's say, Grace Life Church, and caused that church to be, you know, shut down for three months and barricaded and caused, you know, a pastor to be imprisoned. But the people who are in ministry who are in Cabinet who had authority to make those decisions, I think that we're not going to be able to, to declare an amnesty for everyone else who was involved, until we have some accountability at you know, at the upper echelons. And I think that there are grounds for criminal prosecution. But what I think needs to happen in our country, is we actually need to have a full blown, that people who know about the the national citizens inquiry and I know you've had guests on your show, well, who have come on and talked about this. But I think what we need in our country is a national public inquiry commission of inquiry that will have the the ability to subpoena people like the Prime Minister, and Dr. Tam, Dr. Hinshaw and others, and to actually make them sit down and answer questions about decisions that they made and the information that they actually had about for things like vaccines and the impacts of lockdowns because there's no question that that the level of censorship that we're seeing in the complicit participation of, of mass media is preventing us from getting at the truth. And I think what we need to have is a public inquiry that has some teeth, and can actually hold people to account for things that they have done, decisions that they made while they held public office, because they were placed in a position of fiduciary, obligation and duty in accepting those high ranking positions. They accepted the responsibility for their actions. It simply is not sufficient, it's not enough for government officials to say on COVID, that this was a new situation, you know, we did our best with the information that we had. They had a lot of information. We knew in December of 2020, sorry, December of 2019, before any type of emergency declared by the World Health Organization, we knew that COVID-19 specifically impacted the very elderly with multiple comorbidities, we knew that to be true. There were no serious cases involving children, involving working age people, involving pregnant women, we knew all of that. We knew we knew a lot more about COVID. When I say we, I mean, you know, the scientific community and governments knew a lot more about COVID than what was revealed to the public during the pandemic. And a lot of what we were told during the pandemic quite simply, was lies. It was a essentially a psyop. And people who listen to this can call me in a conspiracy theory. But they should understand that I wear that as a badge of courage. All the conspiracy theories have come true. Not a single one, there isn't a single one conspiracy theory that was out there when Jason Kenney called us all tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists, not a single one that that he was describing, has not turned out to be true. In fact, all of them have turned out to be much worse than we even imagined. I think, sadly, these vaccines are going to be no exception. Will Dove 44:06 Yes. I've had a number of people express concerns to me over this decision, because as you've said, as you explained very well, it was based upon jurisdiction, not upon a violation of the Constitution. And the concern that has been raised is did this build in a loophole that the government could use in the future, to pull off something like mandates and to do it in such a way that the courts would uphold it? Leighton Grey 44:32 I think that it is one argument to say in fact, Jay Bhattacharya shares that opinion. However, politically speaking, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that that would or could occur. In hindsight, I think Mr. Kenney would be the first to admit that what he did with Dr. Hinshaw was a mistake, that he never should have done that. I don't think if he had it back, he would take it back. There's no question now, that if the Premier and her government tried to do this again, it would be immediately apparent what was going on, it would, and it would be political suicide for her, she simply would not survive it. And the proof of this is, when you saw how she handled the E. coli breakout in Calgary, if she could have, if she had wanted to, if the political will were there, she could have used that as an opportunity to declare, you know, a province wide outbreak and put us all under under health orders over the E. coli outbreak because as we all know, or should know, E. coli is much, is a much more serious disease than COVID, thankfully, but I don't think that politically, that could possibly happen, even though even though the legal mechanisms to do that are there and people say that they're right. And that's one of the things that has to change. And I my comments earlier about the premiere, I was talking about a report card that concerns me, because there are parts of the law in Alberta that need to change. And there are parts of the Public Health Act that have to go. And we also we also need some changes to human rights legislation in this province. I think that we need to have protection of bodily autonomy that has a specific ground of protection under provincial human rights legislation. I also think that things can be done legislatively, to curb and curtail and prescribe the the jurisdiction or the the discretion, I should say, of judges, because it's important to remember when we're talking about the Charter, and this is the silver lining on the cloud, the Dark Cloud. All the Charter law is judge-made law. Constitutionally, it's not the job of judges in Canada to make law. Their job is to interpret law and to apply the Constitution. But what they've done, and this is another story about judicial activism, but what judges have done because they've been allowed to do it is they've been given the purchase, they've been given the ability through legislative inaction because legislatures have been inert and haven't reacted to it, but they've been given the ability to to create law. For example, we have a carbon tax in Canada, mainly because of the Supreme Court of Canada, because several provinces challenged the carbon tax. And the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted the Federal Government's control over the environment in such a way that it trumps the exclusive authority of provinces over over natural resources. That's the judges making law, they are applying their discretion there. But there are ways that this government can limit the discretion of judges to, for example, take judicial notice of the judges' ability to make to make judicial notice is one that stems from the legislature. The legislature can pass a law prohibiting judges from taking judicial notice of anything. In fact, we don't need judges to do it, we could take that away entirely. It's it's simply a mode of convenience for, just makes their job easier. But then we actually don't need to have a concept of judicial notice at all. Will Dove 48:05 Leighton, you have been in this legal battle now for almost three years, actually longer than that because of other cases, but I'm speaking specifically of the Ingram case that led to this decision. And I know from past interviews, we've done that your views on certain things have changed in that time period. Based on everything that you have learned and been through through this legal marathon. What are your final thoughts for our viewers? Leighton Grey 48:30 I think that what I'd say to our viewers is we need to be far less trusting of government. We have to be much more skeptical about what we're being told. We need to be even more skeptical about what we're receiving from mass media sources. And fortunately, one of the great things about COVID that's occurred, and I think by necessity, is the development of platforms like yours, Will, which did not exist pre COVID. And we've had a proliferation of truth in media, many people, many different outlets in this country. And of course, the federal government is working to suppress them and to censor them. But I think they're only I think they're only feeding the fire of what I'll call populous media, this new wave. And I think people need to turn their attention to these alternative sources of media, for truth, and information, because we're not going to get it from governments, we're not going to get it from legacy media, you're not going to get it off your television. So I think there are there those are positive things that have come about as a result of the pandemic. But the thing that I would say to people that could have prevented this, you know, we have to have a more neighborly approach to the way that we govern ourselves the way that we conduct ourselves. My friend, Shawn Buckley, who I believe has been on your show, the lead lawyer in the National Citizens Inquiry, he quotes the second commandment, which is you know, you know, love thy neighbor, right? We didn't do that during COVID. We reported on our neighbors. We wore masks to protect ourselves from our neighbors. We were the authors of the lockdowns, all the lockdown measures that we had happened because of polling. Because people were scared. They asked for masking, they asked for social distancing. They wanted businesses closed, they wanted schools closed, they wanted churches closed. And we got it all because we asked for it. And the silver lining that people should learn from COVID is that we have that kind of power over government over government. The people we have in government, largely are not ideologues, there are people who want to have power, they want to be in positions of power. They've been drawn to government positions, or political positions because of that lust for power. And they want to hold on to that at all events. And that's why they poll us constantly. Well, if we send messages to them, that we want freedom, that we don't want lock downs that we want smaller government, that that we don't want the World Economic Forum, you know, telling us what to do. What could that mean? What could that mean for Alberta? What could that mean for Canada, it would mean that we could live up to the promise that's laid out in our Constitution, and that is of a free and democratic society that's governed under the supremacy of God and the rule of law that promises peace, order and good government. What we saw through the COVID 19 pandemic is all that was denied. But it's so easy to blame, the Justin Trudeaus and the Theresa Tams and the Deena Hinshaws and the Jason Kenneys, but really, the people that we have to blame for what happened to us more than anyone else, is the person that we look at in the mirror each and every day. And if we take stock of that, and we look to our neighbors, and we form alliances amongst ourselves, and we we we have the courage to say no to these things, no to vaccines, when Dr. Tam comes on and says everybody get up your mask again, and we're going to jab six month old babies with the new safe and effective Moderna vaccine, we need to say no. And we need we need to, we need to demand that she be fired, that she be held to account, that she be removed from public office, because we're paying her to do that job. But that's not happening in this country yet. We're still looking at the tops of the trees. We need to be looking at the roots, because it's the roots that are the problem. COVID-19, the way it unfolded, lockdowns could not have happened if there weren't something dreadfully wrong with the way that we are relating to each other in our society. We need to care more about each other. We need to care more about our communities, need to care more about our schools, about our churches, about our businesses, and not look to government to solve all our problems. To me. that's the greatest lesson that comes out of the COVID 19 pandemic. Will Dove 52:56 Leighton, I know that I speak on behalf of my viewers, and especially my Albertan viewers, when I thank you and Jeff for all the hard work that you've done in getting this landmark decision. I myself am convinced that sometime in the next year, we're going to see many Canadian provinces locked down again as COVID 2.0 is coming. But I have great hopes that Alberta and possibly Saskatchewan are not going to follow along with the narrative this time, that they will instead choose to respect the rights of their citizens and it is a large part due to your work. Thank you so much. Leighton Grey 53:26 I pray that you're right, Will, and thanks for having me on to clarify the Ingram decision because I think it's vitally important that people get the truth about about the case and not what has been widely reported.