Major (Ret) Russ Cooper - The Patriot Pilot: Charting a Course for Canada's Future through C3RF

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where we explore the stories of individuals who embody the spirit of resilience and advocacy. Today, we're privileged to have on the show Major (Ret.) Russ Cooper, a man whose life has soared through the skies as a fighter pilot and now navigates the contentious terrain of civil liberties in Canada.
From his distinguished service in the Persian Gulf War to his subsequent career at Air Canada, Major Cooper's perspective from the cockpit offered him unique insights into the world. But it was upon retiring that he found himself drawn into a different kind of battle—one for the soul and freedom of his country.
Join us as we delve into Major Cooper's journey from the air to activism, sparked by his concerns over Motion M-103 and the perceived threats to Canadian values of unity and free speech. His fight has led him to co-found the Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, an organization championing individual rights amidst what he sees as a growing tide of restrictive legislation.
Today's episode is not just about one man's fight; it's about understanding the challenges to our freedoms and the call to action for every citizen to stand up for the principles that define us. Stay tuned for an enlightening conversation that touches on the heart of what it means to be Canadian.

Interview recorded 9.10.2024

Connect with Russ and C3RF...
Major (Ret.) Russ Cooper:
https://www.canadiancitizens.org/

Canadian Citizens For Charter Rights And Freedoms (C3RF) is a group of Canadians whose mission is to educate Canadians about threats to their Charter Rights, advocate to protect Charter Rights and Freedoms, and propose countering legislation and regulatory frameworks especially focused on freedom of expression.

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

And hello, Hearts of Oak.

Thank you so much for joining us once again with a brand new guest over in Canada, and that is Major Retired Russ Cooper.

Russ, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Oh, thank you, Peter.

It's a real honour to join you, today.

Great to have you on, and thanks to the one and only Valerie Price for connecting us, as she does with many, many people.

And it's always good to have someone like that working in the background, isn't it?

Well, I tell you, it's amazing what she does.

She gets a lot of people started in the area of civil liberties, and she's responsible for my start.

I started, I guess, popping off writing this and writing that, and it was her and her website that gave me a public profile and got me going way back in, what was it, 2016.

And that probably story could be retold by many, many people that we have all bumped into worldwide.

But before we get in, CanadianCitizens.org is the website, and that is the organization you founded and are present of, Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, or C3RF.

All the links will be in the description.

And we want to talk about the work that really came together, I think, on the Islamophobia bill back in 2017.

So, we'll get into all of that. But your background is fascinating to me as a private pilot, as someone I look at your career with a little bit of envy.

Your background, fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force, retired commercial pilot.

Maybe tell us a little bit about that background, which I could do a whole podcast on, but we won't.

Tell me a little bit about that background before we get on to how you got involved in activism.

Well the civil aviation background was it flowed out of my military background flying.

My last fighter tour was on cf-18s.

Oh f-18s

Yes, modern era fighter and I had the opportunity, the honor really to fight for Canada in combat during the first Persian gulf war.

I was there with our 439 tiger squadron a squadron of cf-18s that participated in that that particular conflict and out of that I came back home from Germany, went into a ground job and then in 1997 retired from the military after about 29 years of service and then began looking for a job.

I was still fairly young at the time, I was 45, and wound up in civil aviation initially flying training business jet pilots and and flying business jets from Bombardier Aerospace.

From there, I spent a couple of years there, three, four years, and then applied to Air Canada and got picked up by Air Canada at the salty age of 48.

I remember going into my first meeting with my class, and everybody was coming up to me asking if I was the instructor.

So, I was kind of a late start, a late bloomer when it came to Air Canada.

I proceeded to fly for Air Canada and started out with DC-9s, the old DC-9. Loved that airplane.

Then Airbus A320s and then wound up on the 777, which was just a magnificent aircraft that we took all over the world.

Take a trip, Toronto to Beijing, Toronto, Hong Kong.

Toronto, San Diego, our Asian destinations would go over the polar, over the north pole on the other side down through Siberia and Mongolia and to into china.

It was just an amazing amazing job very glad I had the opportunity to do it, but things being as they were we had 2002, 2003, the company went bankrupt on me and I had to drop out of Air Canada.

I took a leave of absence for about five years.

And then as I was on leave of absence, I picked up an engineering billet for an avionics firm in Montreal.

And basically from there, with my flying background, I got into a position as an engineering flight test pilot.

And so that's where I wound up my flying career, my aviation.

I spent about 40 years, 40 years plus in aviation.

I always think there must be no greater office than a flight deck at 40,000 feet.

How beautiful.

The view is, yeah, the view is wonderful up there, yeah.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of interesting sites up in the concrete, particularly at 777.

Wow.

Well, I would love to delve deeper into that. But I want to get on to the current fight that we have across the Western world for the right to criticize, the right to offend, the right to disagree, which seems to be fast disappearing.

So you're in aviation 40 years.

Then, Probably politics wasn't really something you're engaged in.

How did you end up starting an organization that would pull people together to fight the government on Islamophobia legislation, in effect?

Well, it was kind of a sidestep.

But when I look back on it, not really.

It was kind of a natural progression there.

I was, when I was a fighter pilot, an officer in the Air Force, I guess there's no other way to describe me, but as a true patriot, I love my country.

And when I went into a combat tour, I did so gladly.

I stepped up because I really felt that Canada was a country worth fighting for.

It had values that were not only worth protecting, but projecting.

And in that particular case, we're involved with kicking a tyrant out of a country that didn't want him.

And I thought, yeah, this is a good place for me to be.

So I'm a bit of a bit of a patriot that way.

And then there's another tyrant in Trudeau.

Well, I tell you, we can talk about that for for the whole show, too.

I mean, getting back to my sojourn into civil liberties, it wasn't that much of a step, as I say, because when I – back in 2016, 2017, I was fully retired.

I was going to kick back and enjoy the grandkids. You know, it was time for me to enjoy my golden years.

But all of a sudden, we had these funny narratives coming out of Ottawa.

And all of a sudden, 2016, 2017, they came up with a motion, M103.

And the motion, its underlying premise was the fact that Canadians are systemically racist.

The Canadians are religious discriminators, especially when it comes to Islam and Muslims.

The narrative was, I found extremely insulting, and it is not, they were describing a Canada that I knew did not exist, because over the course of my 40 years, I've been across the country.

I've been around the world, I've seen Canadians of all sorts and stripes work together to do great things.

This is a great country, and we've got great people, and I took offense to, you know, our own leaders telling us that there was, we were debased.

We were, and then that narrative just kept going.

And we were, we were a post-national state.

We had no core values.

Then we were genocidal, you know, with the way that we treated our indigenous populations.

It just went on and on and on.

And I, just could not, as a patriot, I just could not sit back and tolerate that.

I felt compelled.

I was compelled.

I had to sit down and start writing.

What I did was I started writing letters to all the MPs, the members of parliament in Canada, telling them that this is my take.

This is my evidence.

You know, this M103 is wrong.

All it's going to do is show favor to one religion over others. others, it's going to shield that religion from criticism and fair debate and comment.

I said, this is not fair at all.

I mean, if you want to have put something in place that says you can't discriminate against Muslims, fine, I'm all for that.

We shouldn't discriminate against anybody.

But when you start homing in on one religion and creating favor to that religion, all it's going to do is divide.

And that's exactly what it's done.

So that's where it started.

I started writing a few.

When we talk about Valerie, Valerie Price, I don't know how she got a hold of me, but she got a hold of me, and I needed someplace to publish the stuff that I was writing, because I was just writing nonstop, and she gave me her website, and I started posting on her website, and that attracted a couple of folks.

We had less than a dozen got together, and we formed C3RF, Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, And I think it's a pretty good name because we represent Canadian citizens.

We're not politicians.

We're not lawyers.

We're not this race or that religion or anything.

We are Canadian citizens.

And I think that that's the secret of Canada is that everyone unites under the banner of civic nationalism.

We don't unite under a banner of this tribe or that clan.

No, we all believe we have a common belief.

Not like Trudeau said, we have no core values. We have no beliefs.

We do have common beliefs, and they include things like respect for individual rights and freedoms and basically what the Canadian citizen sees in the Charter.

And I say that specifically because Canadian citizens see a certain intent in that Charter.

They see fundamental rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by Canadians, by their representatives, and it's that intent that somehow over the years since the Charter was formed in 1982 has evaporated.

Our politicians, our judges, our legal class, they all seem to forget about the intent.

If anything, they take that intent and ignore it, that intent that there are certain fundamental freedoms, that's Section 2 of the Charter, free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to assemble and associate.

There are fundamental freedoms that are called fundamental for a reason because the intent was to protect and preserve them.

And that intent has been ignored.

And I think that's a travesty.

So us Canadian citizens, I think we have to do something about that.

Do you think those freedoms are being taken for granted?

Do the people think that, well, previous generations have had certain freedoms therefore it's automatically assumed they will continue.

Do you think that's part of the reason why not just Canada but many nations in the west have got ourselves into the predicament, because we've just sat back and assumed it will continue?

Well, yes I think that's a very valid point.

I think you know you go back in time a little bit I grew up in the 50s and 60s as a kid and I remember back then how things were and you know things changed a lot starting in the 60s when we started having the sexual revolution we had the whole the whole thing the whole kind of culture that underpinned, you know, our our western liberal democracies kind of faded away.

People let it go and um and and I think as as a result, we left ourselves open to be taken advantage of by other narratives, other ideologies that we are told are equivalent.

Now we're told that there's no one culture that's better than another.

There's equivalency across the board.

And there is no real truth, this whole thing about objective reality being an imaginary thing.

And everything under the sun is just as good as everything else under the sun.

So we lost that, I guess, that Judeo-Christian ethic, I guess you could call it.

We let that slip away.

And as that slipped away, the vacuum was filled by other ideologies, other ideas that basically took us away from the strength that we did have and the belief we had in a strong and free Canada, in my case.

And we let that slide. So I think that's a valid point.

There's another side to this, and the other side is that actually certain people, certain individuals who have these other ideas or have stepped into the vacuum and purposely and deliberately confused and confounded Canadians and Canadian society with a lot of ideas that don't really belong in a Western liberal democracy.

And we see those ideas thriving now, and they're crazy.

Some of them are just so off the wall that I go, we go back to motion M103 where this Islamophobia came up and the damage that caused in dividing the nation.

But we also have other things that came across the board.

In about the same timeframe, in 2016, we had Bill C-16 in Canada, which was the gender identity and expression bill all of a sudden our our legislators actually told us that if we didn't identify people the way they wanted to be identified as instead of a male or a female they had to be identified as I don't know a puppy dog or a kitten or something like that.

We you know then we could be taken to task we could be taken to a human rights tribunal.

We could be put under the under the the microscope we could be examined we could be punished if we didn't allow our speech to be compelled.

Certainly this was totally, totally against, you know, our right to free speech as per Section 2 of the Charter.

When you're telling people they have to speak a certain way and think a certain way, you are out of bounds.

And we still have that bill, and it's still thriving.

It's now impacted our school system where our children are being taught thought that, you know, they weren't born a boy or a girl.

God may have made a mistake, and you're not really a boy.

You're not really a girl.

How confusing is that for a little kid?

And that drives me around a bit because I got six grandkids, five girls.

And I look at that kind of influence on their upbringing, and, you know, that's not going to smirk.

And I think the majority of Canadians feel like I do.

And I think a lot are just a little bit scared to pop their head above the parapet and say, this is wrong.

No, this is not going to stand. It's wrong.

Well, that compelled speech, I guess that was where Jordan Peterson came to fame over his pushback.

And we're now seeing compelled speech everywhere, having teacher in Ireland recently and on and on.

And he's been one of the biggest figures highlighting this.

But I want to talk to you about kind of the political engagement and also the engagement of the public.

But the issue on the Islamophobia, it's a toxic, dangerous term, as dangerous as the term racism is.

Whenever you use Islamophobic or racist, then immediately it shuts down debate.

And the argument is one because no one wants to think of themselves as someone who hates someone else.

Immediately you pull back, but it's also a huge topic to wade into the issue of engaging on Islam and Islam's position and the freedoms we have to critique any ideology or religion.

So tell me about that because I think maybe when you look back you might think could have picked an easier one, a less inflammatory one, but this is a big issue.

But tell me how that came together, how people came together, how you engaged with the political process in trying to stop that.

Well, it was kind of amazing because it came from nowhere.

And I started writing my letters, my website postings, and I started, we started a petition and that kind of cranked along slowly.

And then all of a sudden, things just changed gear.

I mean, it was like shifting gears in a car.

It was just all of a sudden we were in high speed mode, because people started to pick up on the conversation that was coming out of the press as they covered the Conservative Party who came forward and said, no, we don't think this is a good idea.

We'd like to change the motion to read instead of concentrating on Islamophobia.

They wanted to concentrate on discrimination against Muslims, Jews, Christians, basically everybody, all the religions.

They wanted to make it across the board an equal thing.

That caught the attention of the public, and from that point on, we saw our petition numbers just crank over, you know, just accelerated.

And there were other petitions on board.

In total, I think there were over 200,000 signatures on two or three petitions, ours included, that they just couldn't ignore.

But they went for it anyway.

This was a slam dunk.

You know, the Liberals, they came out with this.

It was a slam dunk deal for them, and they were going to put this through come hell or high water.

And they did, but there was a lot, a lot of people caught, or it caught the attention of a lot of people. So, much so that one member of Parliament, Trost was his name.

He was a conservative.

He reported on his Facebook page that in the few days prior to the actual vote in 2017, he reported that the parliamentary offices had received over 800,000 emails, most of which were against the motion.

They had never seen anything like that.

Over almost 900,000 emails, people saying, no, this is nuts.

Don't do it.

And they did it anyway.

But because there was always, I think, the plan to introduce this motion and open up this Islamophobia gateway.

That eventually there were various funds that were put in place behind it.

They said it was a non-binding motion.

It wouldn't make any differences, but it opened up the doors for a lot of millions and millions of dollars of funding for things like fighting Islamophobia, racism, and everything else.

It became an industry.

It did, and that, what you described, reflects where a lot of us are in or the public servants are no longer servants they have become masters and they simply take in public consultation to tick a box.

It used to be there would be dialogue now it seems to be politicians always know better and we must submit or comply.

Is that how you've kind of seen us in Canada on this issue and the wider issue of free speech?

Well, yes.

And I think the proof is in the pudding.

And we saw that, I think, in spades with the advent of the COVID pandemic.

Because here you saw, there were a lot of questions.

People were wondering just what the heck is going on here?

You know, we've got to stay six feet apart.

We've got to, you know, some poor soul would pop their head above the parapet and say, why six feet?

And then they would immediately get slammed back down into their pod where they belonged.

And you couldn't even ask questions about, you know, like this is an experimental vaccine.

Are there any long-term studies?

Well, you can't ask that question.

I mean, who are you and how do you deserve the right to ask such a question?

So, yes, there was a, I call it an untethering.

Our public service, our politicians, our judiciary, Sherry, they became untethered.

Or maybe the better way to explain it is they had become untethered quite a while ago, but this whole COVID pandemic made everything so crystal clear that they had no intention, no intention of doing what was best for the population.

As a matter of fact, they purposely and deliberately told us we had a safe and effective vaccine when they knew when they were told by their contracts with organizations like Pfizer that it's not, we don't know if it's safe and effective.

We've got no long-term studies.

It's right in the contract.

So we can't guarantee anything down the road that there won't be adverse events that, you know, that might come aboard.

They knew it wasn't safe and effective, and they lied to us, and they were totally untethered with their responsibility to serve the public that they were sworn to serve.

Yeah.

And then, again, I guess the other proof in the pudding there is we talk about Canadian citizens taking notice and finally having enough.

We had Freedom Convoy 2022.

That was a seminal Canadian event that no one wants to admit it in the political class, but that protest was a one-off in Canadian history.

And it went on to spark similar protests around the world, New Zealand, Australia. Basically, all the Western world picked up on it.

They're still driving tractors down highways in Holland and Ireland.

And again, people, I guess we should thank our politicians and our judiciary for doing such a poor job and representing us because it's so poor that we can see it.

And it's crystal clear that we've got a problem.

And one other thing we talk about, you know, this worldwide event, you know, people standing up across the world, right?

They are standing up, I think, against – when we look at the restrictions that are being placed upon people in Canada, we're seeing the same thing happen in Ireland, in Britain, and across the West, in the United States. It's as though our Western leadership is in lockstep.

I'll give you an example.

In the UK in 2021, your government came up with something called the Countering Disinformation Act, or the Countering Disinformation Unit.

Unit, I think.

Countering Disinformation Unit or something, yes.

It was the Disinformation Unit.

When they did that, they coordinated those activities with Canada, Australia, United States, and 20 other.

They had bi-laterals with 20 other nations to do the same thing.

And basically what this disinformation unit was all about was taking a look at any information that they could determine, misinformation, disinformation, and quash it, find it, get it off the Internet.

And you had your legislation come forward as a result. So we are dealing with legislation that comes out of that initiative in 2024 now called the Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.

Basically it's all the same. So across the board we're seeing all these nations.

I think it started with Germany in 2016, 2017 with their internet bill in Germany. And now you see all the Western nations basically replicating that legislation.

People may be standing up in unison against this oppression that we're facing when it comes to our speech, but I think they're doing so because they are going up against a unified oppressor in the form of our Western liberal, so-called liberal governments.

Oh, yeah.

And we'll get on this now, the online harms bill, because we have the online safety bill in the UK. Europe has the DSA, Digital Services Act.

I think Switzerland have similar legislation.

I think the US have COSA, Kids Online Safety, which I think that will be used in this way.

But we see it and you realize how clever the other side is.

They talk about protecting children.

They talk about safety, stopping harm.

These are terms that keep coming up and no one can argue against that and that's the difficulty.

What has been the pushback like in Canada because in the UK parliament collapsed completely in adoration of this bill.

There were maybe might have been a dozen politicians who were against it, but everyone got sucked into this mantra that we must protect children online and this is the way to do it.

What political pushback has there been on this legislation in Canada?

Initially, none.

And it was very much the same case as your experience in Europe.

But what happened was this whole bit about, you know, protecting children online, non-consensual postings online, that was the Trojan horse that was rolled out and presented to the public.

And, you know, this is how they presented it back in February when when our Justice Minister Virani presented it to the Canadian public, this is going to address these very evil things that were happening on the internet.

And no one can argue with that.

But the fact is, is that these are issues that are either already out of bounds in our criminal code or can be addressed through current laws, criminal codes, with modifications here and there.

So, having an online harms act to deal with these things is not really even the best way to go.

Because what they've done is they've included all these other add-ons to the bill. For example, they've constructed a whole new bureaucracy in the form of a digital safety commission. And this commission has powers that are unbelievable.

They can actually, they're not constrained by rules of evidence.

They're not constrained by rules of reasonable search and seizure.

They can walk into an organization, into a company, into a social media place and start collecting files and data without due process.

They can take an anonymous complaint against an individual and with that anonymous anonymous complaint.

They can they can investigate the the the evil wrongdoer the other the person who who said something hurtful or get this might say something hurtful in the future.

This is this is really a pre-crime bill it's It's Orwellian. It's 1984.

It's even worse than 1984.

George Orwell couldn't have envisaged such an oppressive bill.

It's incredible.

And it just goes on and on.

I mean, they just take the charter and they shred it.

They shred Section 1 Limitations Clause to show evidence, to have proof of the need to relieve someone of the rights.

They do away totally with a section two freedom of speech. It's gone you can't even think about anything that might be hurtful.

Gone is section seven and uh section eight search and seizure due process.

I mean the whole chart all the fundamental freedoms are stripped and this is a good thing.

So, I think you talk about you know what's the reaction initially we had a couple of folks, Michael Geist, is is one we have some communications experts that commented on it a few articles here and there with the national post a favorite of ours is is Barbara K.

She stood up and she said this to quote her she said this bill must be stopped.

It's in no uncertain terms she's a iconic Canadian author and a very famous national post columnist she She came forward and said that. So there has been some pushback.

I think we're starting to get to recognition across the board.

I saw this thing happening with Motion M-103.

We've kicked off our own petition in this, but this time we're doing a House of Commons petition.

You have the same thing in the UK where your parliamentary house, a member of it can sponsor a petition.

And if it gets over a certain number of signatures, they have to deal with it.

That's what we've done.

And we've had the good fortune of having the member of parliament, Cathay Wagantall, from the Conservative Party, sponsor our petition.

It's out there now as petition 5160. If you want to take a look at it, just Google petition 5160. And you'll see a pop-up as the number one choice and go ahead and sign it.

And so we are very fortunate to have a miss Wagantall sponsor our petition has just kicked off a few days ago and I got a feeling that this is going to be another another motion demo or three thing where people once they once they start catching on to just what this bill entails and how many any rights they lose, they're going to be furious, absolutely furious.

The politic, because you look at Trudeau when he had a very bad, not disastrous enough general election, and he was weakened, and yet this seems to be continually pushed through.

You've got the Conservatives seemingly with a Conservative leader now in Pierre Paul, I can't pronounce his surname. Paul-Yves.

Paul-Yves. Forgive my French. in Pierre.

So that seems to be, and Maxime Bernier has been pushing many issues extremely well, but hasn't had that political traction electorally.

So there are things happening, and I've certainly seen a number of Pierre's speeches doing very well.

How does that all fit together with a weakened Trudeau and possibly an actual conservative Conservative Party?

Well, I think we're seeing it now.

I think we're seeing the Liberal Party is really on the ropes, not only with this particular issue and the stripping of our Canadian Charter of Freedoms and Rights. He's in the locking stock. He's for scandal.

I mentioned earlier in this discussion how the Liberal Party; they put these funds together to fight Islamophobia, fight racism, but they put other funds together that basically are in the budget, but they don't have any particular thing assigned to them to be spent on.

They're just for Islamophobia.

They're for racism.

They have big ones for capital infrastructure, $35 billion fund for capital infrastructure.

It could be anything, LRTs or whatever, you know, just whatever you want to go in there and request.

They also have huge funds for greening, the greening of the new green deal type thing.

And the latest, I guess, scandal is the fact that 330 million of these green fund dollars have gone have slipped off the have slipped into the ethosphere and and wound up in in companies that are headed by by liberals or friends of liberals and so it's kind of embarrassing.

And so we see a weakened liberal party a weakened Trudeau and uh at the same time I don't think coincidentally you're seeing a rising Pierre polio he is becoming now.

He's becoming more forceful as he garners more public opinion on his side.

As his polling numbers go up, he is becoming more and more brave in asserting conservative values that have been kind of, you know, kept under the covers for many, many years now.

So he is being emboldened.

And that is a very good thing to see.

Up until now, I think the only politician who's really been pushing these issues, these attacks on our freedoms and our rights, is, as you say, Maxime Bernier.

But he's a voice in the wind.

He's got a lot of good ideas, but he does not get a lot of press play.

He is not popular with the press.

If anything, they denigrate him.

They insult him.

They say he's far right, he's extreme, he's a white nationalist, Christian nationalist.

You know, anybody that's kind of just to the right of – you know, Marx in Canada, it's a tell of a hundred these days, you know, like there is no, there is no right left.

It's just, you got your right thinkers, and you got your wrong thinkers in Canada.

And if you're a conservative who believes in conservative values, family values, well, you're, you're, you're on the wrong end of the narrative there, but it is starting to change.

I love having Maxime on a great interview with him and love following him from afar, complete common sense, able to put forward a position and doesn't give up and engaging.

But I mean, you look at the political landscape, you think of Canada as more to the left.

You kind of, it seems to be it's kind of 60-40 or two-thirds, one-third. So it does seem as though any conservative leader has an uphill battle.

I don't know whether that kind of mix is in the population or whether it's more media pushed or whether it's kind of just traditionally being politically the stronger party has been the left.

I don't know kind of where all that fits together because it does seem worldwide on the left there is a lack of patriotism a self-loathing of the nation state of history and that's why we've got to the position we are in.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

It is true that Canada is very much a left-leaning nation.

We've kind of lost that whole concentration on that Judaeo-Christian ethic is evaporated and the vacuum has been filled by people I wouldn't say you know people are necessarily of left persuasion.

I think a lot of people get uh they just fall into line i mean Canada is a country that

Has that kind of tendency to lean to the left. I mean, it's kind of baked into our history.

It's the old Garrison mentality, you know, like Canada is the great white north.

You know, we're always cold here.

It's freezing.

It's like the Arctic. You know, you've got to band together, help each other out, you know, to get to the winter side thing.

And that, you know, you end up with this Garrison mentality that can really take hold of the national fabric.

There's another aspect to this, though, and that, you know, along with having that Garrison mentality, you know, that we also have this pioneering spirit.

You know, we have the Voyageur that, you know, launched off from Upper and Lower Canada into the hinterland and canoes to trap and trade with the indigenous population, to build up the nation on the basis of going out and exploring, then we have that.

Actually, you see that very much so in the West. And the West is kind of that, was built on that, with that pioneering spirit in mind.

And you can see that divide in Canada.

You know, you've got your Laurentian folk who basically, Central Canada, who basically have the power, have the political power, run the country,

The Western folk, the more pioneering type, I guess, who provide all the resources, work, and money for Central Canada to use as they see fit. It's an arrangement that is wearing thin.

And this recent last nine years under the Liberal government with all the division that has been brought on board, I'd say Canada's in for a rough time when it comes to keeping itself together and keeping itself unified.

And we're seeing, especially when you have this east-west divide, you're looking at the central Canadians wanting to quash fossil fuels, and you look at the west who need fossil fuels.

It's the basis of their prosperity.

It's in everything that they do and they build.

Fossil fuels are a big part of that.

So you're creating a divide here that is ultimately capable of splitting the nation.

We used to say French-English, but I think the East-West, that divide is much more pronounced.

So it's an interesting time.

No, it is.

And I know that the diversity, inclusion, the multiculturalism, that is a battle we're all facing.

But it seems like Canada is, and there is a fight for identity and what it means for the nation state.

And Canada seems to be maybe even a little bit more than the UK.

I could be wrong, but seems to be in a state of confusion of what it means to be itself.

Mass immigration changed Canada a lot.

Toronto is a complete melting pot. Well, as is London.

So this is not on Canada, not on the UK.

We're in the same boat.

But is that a fair assessment that there is a struggle at the moment for Canada as a nation to understand what it means to be Canadian? Because that seemed to be chipped away.

And there's a struggle to understand what those values mean.

Yes, that's very true.

And what we're seeing now is we're importing, we're bringing people in at record rates.

It's our population kind of jumped 2 million in a couple of years there, just over the past couple of years, it's incredible.

It's to the point where we can't handle the infrastructure, can't handle this, the newcomers that are coming at us.

So we're having housing crises, we're having inflation, we're having all these problems as a result of basically it's self-inflicted immigration policies that are really killing us that we could change tomorrow, we could change overnight.

But our betters, our political betters don't seem to want to do that.

They have another agenda in mind and it is wreaking havoc on our unity as well because the problem on the unity side is the fact that we're bringing these people in and we're encouraging them to maintain their old cultures.

We're bending over backwards to let them do things the way they want to do them. And as a result, we're basically importing a whole bunch of tribes with no unifying message to unite them that underpins their presence in Canada.

The only thing that can unify people like this of diverse backgrounds is to have a common understanding that everybody signs up to.

And up until now, that common understanding in a Western liberal democracy has always been individual rights and freedoms.

You know, if you concentrate on giving on servicing individual rights and freedoms, well, then all of a sudden all the tribes go away.

Because okay you can have your tribe you can you can worship the way you want to worship but

Underlying all that is an understanding and a respect for individual rights and freedoms so that you respect what the other person wants to worship or do with his life.

And this whole aspect of allowing people to, as much as possible, live their own lives the way they want and realize their own life dreams.

In the States, I think they do that when they say in their constitution that they talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In Canada, we have life, liberty, and the security of the person.

I think that's a mistake on our part, because I think the pursuit of happiness really homes in on that whole idea of people being unencumbered to live their lives without being bothered by governments and being told what to do, which is the case in Canada right now.

We've let that unifying philosophy slip out of our fingers and it's playing havoc right now is what it's doing.

So we here at C3RF, we like to think that we are in the business of educating, of letting people know that, you know, there's a history to Canada.

And it does really concentrate on individual rights and freedoms.

And we really need to get back there because it's the only way we're going to unify a nation and all these various tribes that are landing on our shores.

It's, you know, it's the way we have to go if we're going to survive as a nation, I think.

Okay, so just to finish off with, there'll be Canadians watching, there'll be individuals watching, and they want to know what part they can play.

They go to the website canadiancitizens.org, they're on the screen.

What part are you asking citizens to play as you fight back against this online harms bill?

Well, we'd really love for Canadians to take a look at our House of Commons petition and sign up.

They can go to our website at www.canadiancitizens.org in the take action heading in the banner up top.

You can click on that. It'll drop down. You'll see say no to Bill C-63.

Click on that and you'll have the whole explanation and the bill at your disposal.

Or you could go to, you know, Google petition 5160 with a space between petition and 5160.

Petition 5160, you'll see petition pop up as one of the top choices.

Click on that and go ahead and sign the petition. We really have to get this. We really have to let our members of parliament know that we're taking this very, very seriously. obviously, because from what I can see, this is the final nail in the coffin that they're burying free speech in.

This is the final nail.

If they bring this bill on board, then basically, speech in Canada is going to be chilled like it is going to be the Arctic of the Great White North. It's going to be unbelievably hard to have an opinion that doesn't meet muster with our betters.

So please take a look at our website, canadiancitizens.org, petition 5160, and sign it.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Major Russ Cooper.

It's fantastic to talk to you, to meet you, and to hear of the work that Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms are doing, the vital work and the fight back for free speech.

So thank you so much for your time today in sharing what you're doing.

And the viewers and listeners can be part of that by going to the website, sign up and see by signing the petition, and what else you can do. So, thank you so much for your time today.

Well, thank you.

It's been an honor, Peter and thanks very much for the opportunity.

It's been great.