Oh, Canada’s hypocrisy! ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters face ludicrous prison sentences for mere ‘mischief’
According to Canada’s top prosecutors, the only thing worse than tyranny is “mischief.” And the worst possible “mischief” is objecting to tyranny.
In a sentencing hearing earlier this week, the Canadian government sought a ludicrous eight-year sentence for Chris Barber, one of the leaders of the Covid “Freedom Convoy” protest that riled Ottawa in early 2022. For another leader, Tamara Lich, the Crown asked for an outlandish seven years.
In April, a court ruled that Barbers and Lich were not guilty of obstructing police or intimidation during the demonstrations. But they were convicted of “mischief” — in part because the truckers in the 40-mile convoy honked their horns to protest some of the most oppressive Covid mandates in the world.
Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher justified the harsh prison sentences saying “it’s difficult to imagine an offense of mischief with greater impact.”
Ironically, that was the same way that many truckers felt about the Canadian government’s Covid mandates. And now Canadian prosecutors are hounding the former protestors, pretending that a Canadian judge did not raze their entire legal house of cards a year ago.
From the start of the pandemic, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acted as if Covid entitled him to absolute power. Anyone who refused to get the approved Covid vaccines was castigated as a public enemy.
Trudeau responded to the trucker protest by invoking the Emergencies Act, effectively dropping a legal nuclear bomb on his opponents. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the government was “broadening the scope of Canada’s … terrorist-financing rules so that they cover Crowd Funding Platforms and the payment service providers they use.”
The Trudeau government did not formally redefine horn-honking as a terrorist offense but that didn’t impede their crackdown. Banks were authorized to freeze the personal accounts of anyone suspected of donating to the truckers.
The Covid vaccines were catastrophically failing to prevent infections at the same time Trudeau dropped an iron fist on anti-vax protestors. Almost 90% of Canadian adults had been vaccinated by the start of 2022 as Covid cases were soaring, setting records almost every week. Even though he was vaxxed and boosted, Trudeau himself came down with Covid during the trucker protest.
Trudeau pretended that no Canadian had a right not to get injected because he personally proclaimed that the Covid vaccine was safe. But the rushed approval process ignored potential adverse side effects. (The Food and Drug Administration now requires formal warnings about Covid vaccine risks of pericarditis — stabbing chest pains — and myocarditis.)
In January 2024, Canadian federal judge Richard Mosley ruled that Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act had been unreasonable, illegal and unconstitutional. Trudeau’s regulations “criminalized the attendance of every single person at those protests regardless of their actions.” The judge slammed “the absence of any objective standard” for freezing bank accounts, but the court decision provided no relief for any of the victims whose bank accounts were unjustifiably seized or whose freedom and privacy was shredded.
America saw similar absolute immunity for politicians who fueled fear and fabricated emergencies to seize absolute power, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous decree forcing nursing homes to accept Covid patients, President Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate for large private companies and Covid Czar Tony Fauci’s presidential pardon for sending U.S. tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that killed 7 million people worldwide.
The persecution of trucker protestors is a stark reminder of the two-class system that permeated the pandemic in Canada and the U.S. There were no true “lockdowns.” Instead, the laptop class and officialdom stayed home and enjoyed full salary, while the comparatively downtrodden delivered their groceries, fancy meals, and endless knick-knacks from Amazon.
But all those doorstep deliveries were forgotten when the Canadian political and media elite teamed up to vilify any citizen who didn’t submit to official commands. All the judicial precedents established since THE Magna Charta CARTA? were practically expunged by a ruling class that justified even Quebec’s idiotic Covid decree prohibiting people from leaving their homes at night
Perhaps the best punishment for the two Canadian trucker protest leaders would be to televise them standing in front of a blackboard where they write a hundred times: “I’m sorry I objected to tyranny.” An even more apt punishment would be to compel all the Canadian politicians and officials who enforced oppressive Covid policies to wear ashes, sackcloth, and a sign: “I’m sorry for my tyranny.”
Is a little “mischief” the only way to get politicians to heed a Constitution?
James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.“
