It started more than a year ago, took nearly 50 days in a courtroom and may not be decided until next year, but the trial of two leaders of the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” protest in Ottawa finally ended Friday.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber pleaded not guilty to mischief, intimidation, obstruction and other charges.
Crown prosecutors called 16 witnesses and presented hours of video evidence and numerous social media posts in an effort to prove their case.
In a sea of complicity, acts of individual courage illuminate the darkness. One such moment, seared into my mind and giving me hope each day, is captured in a 1936 photograph of August Landmesser at the Blohm+Voss shipyard, where he alone crossed his arms, refusing to give the Nazi salute. His silent defiance became an enduring symbol of resistance to tyranny.
This is not an argument suited to Canada where for the past decade the public has been silenced by a Liberal government intent on criminalizing dissent to its policies.
The Liberal government has maliciously labeled anyone a racist who spoke out in opposition to its mass immigration policy.
That same Liberal government labeled anyone who spoke out against Islamist predation Islamophobic.
That same lunatic Liberal government labels you a transphobe because you refuse to believe women have penises.
In Canada governments at all levels have embraced DEI and its hate fueled fanatics who label even children as racist oppressors just because they have white skin.
Want a job in the civil service? Forget about it if you’re a White male.
Planning to stand up for your self if you’re “White”? Why you must be a nativist Nazi worse than Hitler!
My readers and I, a happy conglomerate of faiths, have been called all of those things over the years by our so called “elites” and organizations the Liberal government subsidizes.
A few prominent voices have spoken out against the perversity of DEI and its persecution of White people but most stood by in silence.
Was their silence also complicity?
There’s a lot going on today. B’nai Brith has embraced DEI hoping to win a coveted spot on the designated victimhood wall of fame and we just can’t wait to find out who the Villainous Oppressor Colonizers are keeping them down!
And now this … CIJA decides to sacrifice the JDL.
This unfortunate statement from CIJA gives definition to the term Erev Rav or Kapo. A Jewish student attended an Israel Now Counter Protest against Hamas supporters and waved a Jewish Defence League banner and CIJA posted their nonsense. CIJA should of joined the Counter… https://t.co/gZ3LoP2pbe
— neveragainlivepodcast@gmail.com (@neveragainlive1) September 13, 2024
OTTAWA – Today is expected to mark the end of the criminal trial for two prominent organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” protest, more than one year after the proceedings began.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are co-accused of mischief, intimidation and counselling others to break the law, among other charges.
The trial has been legally complicated and burdened with a huge body of evidence that stems from the three-week long demonstration in 2022 that blocked streets and frustrated Ottawa residents.
It appears that freedom of speech is under attack all across the western world. One only has to look at Britain or Ireland to see draconian crackdowns by governments against speech they don’t like. As is typical in these times, it is “woke” leftist governments that are mainly engaging in this behaviour.
Ah, I arrived at the gate for my Berlin flight, and found that it’s delayed for 90 minutes. So I have time to dash off something. I think this is important, actually.
Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister.
Police are recording more non-crime hate incidents than last year despite a crackdown on the practice, according to official data.
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, last year told police they should only log reports of hate incidents that were below the criminal threshold if there was a serious risk of harm and not just because someone was offended.
The changes, introduced through statutory guidance in June last year, followed “trivial” cases such as a man who ended up with a police file for whistling the theme tune to Bob the Builder at his neighbour, who perceived racial hatred.
We need to talk about Julie Sweeney.
She’s a 53-year-old English woman who used to live in Church Lawton, Cheshire, and she once had a Facebook account. Today, she’s in prison, serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted under new Criminal Code provisions in the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
Few things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.
There’s a lot of this going around these days.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
A UK woman recently received a sentence of 15 months in prison for a Facebook post under the country’s new Online Safety Act, legislation that is similar in many ways to Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act.
The UK law, enacted in 2023, will come into full effect next year, but the part relating to “false and threatening communications” came into effect Jan. 31 this year and is already being enforced.
John Carpay is a rugged veteran of the beleaguered Canadian civil rights movement as founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. Over the years he’s been the target of frequent unjust harassment, but is now in the throes of a particularly odious and hypocritical persecution, which should concern all Canadians. At the worst of the Covid pandemic, with oppressive lockdowns and requirements of vaccine passports, mask-wearing, distancing, and belligerent and unctuous enforcement of all these rules, most of which we now know to have been medically superfluous if not counterproductive, with disastrous results in all other respects, John Carpay was one of the great many Canadians who was disgusted by the hypocrisy of politicians and public officials rigorously imposing Covid rules while ignoring them themselves. Unlike most of the vast number of people who objected to these practices, he determined to do something about them. In 2021, he engaged a private investigator to see if the widespread rumours about the premier of Manitoba, its chief health officer, and its chief justice were in fact breaking Covid rules, were true. The investigator followed these men around but did not otherwise bother them, but in consequence of this activity, which was designed as a legitimate pursuit of the public’s right to know, John Carpay was briefly prosecuted in a spurious and politically motivated criminal action in the course of which he was briefly incarcerated, and the Manitoba Law Society inflicted upon him more than two years of disciplinary proceedings. Carpay agreed to a lifetime ban on practicing law in Manitoba and payment to the Manitoba Law Society of $5,000.
OTTAWA – In a contest between the Charter-protected freedom of expression and Ottawa residents’ right to the enjoyment of their property, there is no contest, the lawyer for “Freedom Convoy” organizer Tamara Lich argued Friday.
Lawrence Greenspon’s final arguments in the criminal trial focused largely on the fundamental freedoms that protect protest in Canada, and the failure of Ottawa police to enforce the law during the 2022 demonstration.
A salutary tale for our times. An Englishman who the judge condemned as a “keyboard warrior” has been jailed for three years for posts he made on Twitter/X during the recent UK riots. When Wayne O’Rourke from Lincoln first appeared in court, the BBC reported that prosecutors alleged his posts contained “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.”
Yes, you read that correctly: the police arrested the idiotic O’Rourke because they decided his online words were not only anti-Muslim, but also “anti-establishment.” Amid all the soul-searching chatter about the causes and consequences of the brief outburst of unrest in UK towns and cities, that should stand out as a warning for the future.
There will be a place in Canada’s history books for the divisive and dramatic blockade at Coutts, a busy border crossing between Alberta and Montana that saw a clamorous protest against COVID-19 health measures in 2022.
Although it stretched just 18 days, its repercussions continue in Canada’s courts, politics, national security and policing.
The refusal of the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson against the outrageous aggregation of injustices that have been inflicted upon him by academic and professional authorities and the lower courts neatly completes the self-exposure of the bankruptcy of our system of protection of civil rights — everyone’s civil rights. This treatment of Professor Peterson, Canada’s leading public intellectual and probably the most famous and esteemed Canadian in the world, is extremely important for what his case reveals and its implications for all Canadians.
“The Government of Canada will — wrongly — take British riots as validation of their vicious suite of legislation to control how we use the internet here.”
The recent spate of rioting in Great Britain appears to have subsided. However as the smoke clears, two things are left to talk about.
First, could this kind of rioting happen in Canada? Answer, probably not and if it did, it wouldn’t be for quite the same reasons. But the kind of free-speech crackdown employed by Westminster is exactly what Canadians can expect the next time we want to talk about government overreach in — let’s say a pandemic response.
