Canada: What happened to the Freedom Convoy protestors who were arrested?
The Expose | Rhoda Wilson | Expose-News.com
On Tuesday, The Federal Court of Canada decided in favour of the Freedom Convoy protestors. The court ruled that the decision to use the War Measures (Emergencies) Act to respond to the Freedom Convoy was unreasonable and excessive and that the invocation of the Emergencies Act violated sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Lawyers from across Canada rejoiced on hearing the news that the Emergencies Act was deemed unconstitutional by the Federal Court of Canada, True North reported.
Now that the court has ruled the government acted without legal justification, what about the protestors who were punished, arrested and, more urgently, those who are still in jail?
Punishing Protestors
The following is the section titled ‘Punishing Protestors’ in the article titled Justin Trudeau’s Canada: A Cautionary Tale of Receding Freedoms, written by Hannes Sarv and published by Freedom Research.
Jordan Peterson warns us that we should pay close attention to how Canada is curbing freedoms. He is right to do so and not only because of his own experience.
“This is where the reader should pay careful attention, Canadian or otherwise, because this is what lies ahead in the West, given the course our [Canadian] leaders and their still-blind and deaf followers are charting,” Peterson wrote in an opinion piece last week.
Peterson’s case is not an isolated incident of how a citizen might be treated in Canada if his or her opinions are not what those in power would expect. The way the Canadian state has behaved towards its citizens in recent years was vividly illustrated in the covid crisis and its aftermath.
Just think of the brute force used by the Canadian state in February 2022 to disperse the people who had been protesting for several weeks in the capital Ottawa, led by truckers, against the vaccine coercion and the senseless covid rules. In addition, the state froze the assets of people and companies involved in the protests.
It is important to note that the protest was entirely peaceful, but the Trudeau government decided to use the Emergencies Act to disperse it. Under this law, the federal government can declare a state of national emergency if something seriously endangers the health and safety of Canadians or seriously threatens the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Canada.
In essence, it is a law to be used in a situation of war – in 1988 it replaced the previous War Measures Act and since then the new law has never been used. The Act gives the federal government a great deal of power – for example, the right to ban and disperse assemblies or to freeze and confiscate the property of individuals.
The unprecedented use of the law was already heavily criticised two years ago, and on Tuesday a Canadian court ruled that its use was not justified.
“I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation (of the Emergencies Act) does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified,” Ottawa federal judge Richard Mosley wrote in a statement of the decision. The Trudeau government promised to appeal.
The way in which the organisers of these protests have been treated is also remarkable. Tamara Lich, for example, was arrested on 17 February 2022 and initially refused bail by the court. She was only released on 7 March 2022.
On 7 June of the same year, she was arrested again, accused of violating the conditions of her first release. In particular, this was attributed to her attendance at a gala where she accepted an award for organising protests. The state interpreted this as a breach of the conditions of her release, as she was forbidden to meet other protest organisers who were present at the same gala. In addition, she was banned from social media, but she did participate in one podcast. Again, her bail application was initially rejected and she had to spend almost a month in prison before a higher court agreed to her release.
Although she has not been jailed since then, the story cannot yet be put to bed. Along with another trucker protest organiser, Chris Barber, they still face criminal charges and have to defend themselves in court. They are accused of mischief, obstructing police, counselling others to commit mischief and intimidation. The long and gruelling proceedings themselves are a punishment in this case. But at least Lich was recently allowed back on social media – the ban on its use ended on 21 December last year.
A Polish-Canadian pastor, Artur Pawlowski, who protested against the restrictions imposed during the covid crisis, was forced to endure a similarly lengthy trial. For failing to comply with the restrictions, he was fined more than 40 times, repeatedly arrested, and kept under house arrest.
He was eventually charged with taking part in the same Freedom Convoy protests. Only instead of Ottawa, he was taking part in blocking a bridge linking Canada to the United States in Coutts. A significant proportion of trade between the two countries passes over this bridge. Pawlowski’s involvement meant he gave a speech to the people protesting there. He was therefore found guilty of mischief for urging truckers to continue the border protest, i.e. blocking traffic on the bridge. For this, he was eventually sentenced to 60 days in prison.
Outside the Covid issue, other recent examples of abuse of power can also be highlighted. We recently wrote in our news round-up about how David Menzies, a reporter for the alternative publication Rebel News, who tried to interview Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, was obstructed by the police and arrested. The whole event was filmed and the police’s conduct led to widespread criticism. It is probably for this reason that Menzies was quickly released and not charged.
Some of the Protestors Are Still in Jail, Years Later
Canadian trucker and writer Gord Magill joined Tucker Carlsonon Wednesday to talk about the Coutts Four.
Four Alberta men attended the Coutts, Alberta, blockade in support of Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.
On 13 and 14 February 2022, lineman Jerry Morin, landscaper Chris Carbert, electrician Chris Lysak and gravel truck operator Anthony Olienick were arrested on charges of mischief over $5,000. Charges of conspiracy to commit murder were soon added. They were dubbed the Coutts Four.
At 4:30 pm on 14 February, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. At the Public Order Emergency Commission in Ottawa, many government officials testified that the arrests in Coutts underscored the need to declare a national emergency.
The Coutts Four have been in custody for 23 months, over 700 days. Denial of bail in Canada is rare. People charged with serious crimes routinely get bail. Even people charged with first-degree murder of a police officer.
Canada has descended into an extremely dark place, Carlson said.
“The freedom Convoy in Ottawa was crushed [with Royal Canadian Mounted Police] smashing the windows of trucks [and] beating up peaceful protesters,” Magill said.
The Coutts Four were at the Freedom Convoy protest exercising their rights to object to government policies, Magill explained. “Due to very powerful forces, they’ve been caught up and railroaded, really, by the government and sort of used as used as pawns.”
After the Freedom Convoy ended, and was crushed by Trudeau and the government, there was an inquest called the Public Order Emergency Commission. Justice Paul Rouleau was appointed Commissioner.
“Justice Rouleau, in his conclusion, about the question of whether or not Justin Trudeau was justified in imposing the Emergencies Act … reluctantly agreed that Trudeau was within his rights,” Magill said. “And most of that hinges on this case in Coutts, which once you investigate it isn’t much of a case at all.”
“These four regular working-class dudes who are at the protest site have now been imprisoned for almost two years. They were denied bail. They’re kept in what’s called remand because they haven’t been convicted of anything. They haven’t faced trial yet so they don’t get the rights afforded to convicted prisoners; they’ve been subject to long stints of solitary confinement and denial of certain medical care.”
“They’ve treated these guys like crap,” Magill said and explained how the Coutts Four have been set up with a false narrative created by state-funded media and a state-funded social justice group called Anti-Hate Network.
Trudeau is vindictive, Magill said. “He can’t be wrong; he can’t admit that the largest peaceful protest in Canadian history was just that, [a peaceful protest].”
Magill has started a Give Send Go campaign for the Coutts Four to raise money for “more robust and competent legal representation” than they have received so far; to “get these men out of jail and re-unite them with their long-suffering families.” You can support the ‘Trudeaus Political Prisoners’ campaign HERE.
Original Article: https://expose-news.com/2024/01/27/canada-what-happened-to-arrested-protestors/
Tucker Carlson Surveys the Ruins of Canada After Eight Years of Trudeau
“There is no media in the world I have more contempt for than the Canadian Media. They literally work for the Canadian government. They are state media.” —Tucker Carlson, 24 January, 2024
Tucker Carlson is in Alberta today to address audiences in Calgary and Edmonton. He will be joined on the stage at Calgary’s Telus Convention Centre by Alberta’s Premier, Danielle Smith. Premier Smith, elected to Alberta’s top job just 9 months ago, is pushing back against the Woke authoritarianism epitomized by the antics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
An inductee into the perverse cult of Klaus Schwab’s WEF, Trudeau is obsessively attacking the health and viability of Alberta’s otherwise vibrant oil and gas sector.
Carlson’s visit comes just as Federal Judge Richard Mosley has condemned the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergency Act in February of 2021. The Emergency Act basically halted the normal operations of the Canadian government. The most recent incarnation of the War Measures Act allowed Trudeau and his main handler, Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, to notoriously seize the bank accounts of Truckers from across Canada.
These Truckers had famously converged in Ottawa to present a well reasoned critique of the lethal and draconian measures forced on Canadians in the name of fighting COVID-19.
The fact that a Federal Court has now decided that the Emergency Act was wrongfully imposed, has major legal and political ramifications for the Trudeau government, for the criminalized Truckers, and for Canadian citizens generally.
The Federal Ruling came down after the Tucker Carlson’s taping of a conversation with Gord Magill, a refugee from Canada living in upper New York state. Magill has been a Canadian Trucker although he did not take part in the legendary parking protest in Ottawa in the winter of 2021. Magill has published several editorials on Canadian issues in Newsweek.
One of the major subjects that Tucker and Gord Magill did discuss in the video was the persecution of four men singled out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP announced their charges against the men on February 14 of 2021 just as the Trudeau government was about to announce the Emergency Act.
The police forces trying to do the bidding of the Trudeau government had desperately looked for Truckers at Ottawa who would fill the bill of “terrorists.” They found none even though they riffled through many parked trucks looking for loaded guns. Since 9/11 the mere utterance of the word “terrorism” seems sufficient to empower governments to crush various types of legitimate dissent in the name of protecting the public.
A government investigation in 2022 of the invocation of the Emergency Act turned up a note by Deputy Prime Minister Freeland that related the advice given her by a banker friend.
The banker proposed to Freeland that the Truckers should be “designated as a terrorist group,” that their “assets should be seized” and that they should thereby be “impaired.” (See Freeland’s note below which came up as part of her evidence in the Rouleau Inquiry.)
That scrawled note jotted down before Feb. 14 described precisely what happened subsequently. The Emergency Act also empowered police to violently beat protesters and run them down with horses
“This hand-scrawled note by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was recently tabled before the Emergencies Act inquiry. Probably the most notable thing is the top line in which she suggests providing a list of “mischief-makers” to Canadian banks – which did indeed happen. Or you can marvel that Canada’s second-in-command has the illegible penmanship of a badly sleep-deprived physician” (National Post)
The Trudeau government reached out to the Truckers demonstration at Coutts and came up with four men that the RCMP agreed to charge with the accusation that they had conspired to kill cops. These four men were denied bail by Liberal Party judges including Johnna Kubik. These political prisoners, convicted of nothing, have been consistently maltreated in jail for two years now.
The Coutts Four have been denied legal help by, for instance, the Calgary-based Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and the sketchy Democracy Fund associated with sketchy Rebel News. The Coutts Four have been taken away from their families and jobs and incomes. Nevertheless they have been required already to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay a long stream of legal bills in what is misleadingly described as a “pre-trial process.”
The Coutts Four have already been subjected to a number of weird unorthodox procedures that have put a cloud of suspicion on the whole process, but especially over the main Crown Prosecutor, Stephen Johnston. When secret evidence was accidentally released by the Crown to the lawyers for the accused, the lawyer for Tony Olienick accused the Crown Prosecutor, Stephen Johnstone, of committing “crime fraud.” This crime fraud, it was alleged, took the form of the directives given by Johnstone to the RCMP. The RCMP are apparently conceived of as Johnstones’ “clients” subject to “solicitor-client privilege.”
Olienick’s lawyer, Tonii Roulston, asked to be removed from the case after making accusations against the Crown Prosecutor. Did Ms. Roulston withdraw from the proceeding voluntarily or under duress?
The RCMP themselves are in a deep conflict of interest because they claim to be targets of a plot by the four accused men put together artificially onto a single trial to heighten the perception that they were all mutually engaged in a “conspiracy.” The RCMP themselves are curating the evidence in this murder trial that lacks any murdered victim.
Thus those curating the evidence are RCMP members operating on the principle that they themselves are the would-be victims of the unrealized actions that supposedly took place exclusively in the imaginations of those accused of thought crimes. The RCMP case involves testimony from unnamed police plants who secretly taped the accused in a scheme of obvious entrapment to bring about a desired political outcome in a heavily politicized case. It involved the production on Feb. 14 of a RCMP photo widely distributed in the media of odds and sods of weaponry gather who knows where and with proper chains of custody.
The photo of course is meant to mislead those who initially saw it in the newspaper beside the initial published accounts of the alleged crimes. The picture offered a (false) appearance proof that the police were dealing with an open and shut case. Now almost two years later it is becoming increasingly clear that there is nothing open and shut about this case. What is very clear, however, is the extreme bias of the police, the prosecutors and Trudeau’s bought-and-paid-for media who continue to hit obstacles in convicting the Coutts Four.
The origins of this tainted legal process go back to the Trudeau government’s need to come up with some evidence of terrorism to justify issuing the Emergency Act. This Emergency Act has now been deemed by a Federal Judge to have been illegal from the moment it was enacted. It is Trudeau who should by now be on trial if Canada was something other than a police state in the making.
Although the process against the Coutts Four now under way is frequently referred to as a “pre-trial procedure,” that characterization misrepresents what is really going on. In fits and starts the trial of the Coutts Four has in reality been going on for a long time already. If the process looks like a trial, acts like a trial, and makes noises like a trial, it is a trial.
Meanwhile, Trudeau’s bought-and-paid-for media have been delivering the goods by conducting an outrageous ongoing trial-by-media of the Coutts Four.
The New York Times has been covering the story closely, probably with the view that this legal matter approximates the style of criminalization applied to the protesters at the US Capital on Jan 6, 2021.
The imperative of this trial-by-media is to paint the Coutts Four as “insurrectionists” in a disgraceful miscarriage where much of the malevolence can be traced back to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
Source: Looking out at the World from Canada
Original Article: https://www.globalresearch.ca/tucker-carlson-surveys-ruins-canada-after-eight-years-trudeau/5847527
Trudeau Government Faked Intelligence to Frame Freedom Convoy Truckers as Violent Extremists, Investigation Finds
DavidIcke.com | Richard Willett
Will Jones | DailySceptic.org
The Canadian Government used disinformation in the form of faked intelligence to frame the Freedom Convoy anti-vaccine-mandate protesters as violent extremists and justify invoking the Emergencies Act, an investigation by Public has found. Here’s an excerpt.
A months-long Public investigation reveals that the Canadian Government used disinformation to crack down on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest, led by truckers demanding an end to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, in February 2022. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s national police force, then promoted this false information to other ‘Five Eyes’ English-speaking nations.
This discovery is significant because it contributes to a pattern of intelligence agencies from the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which have collaborated on surveillance since World War II, being caught abusing their powers to investigate and persecute the political enemies of elected officials.
In 2013, the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. Government and other nations had violated legal protections against warrantless surveillance. Collaboration between Five Eyes nations also appears to have been used by the FBI in 2016 to create the pretext used for initiating the Russian collusion investigation, which U.S. Department of Justice special prosecutor John Durham denounced last year.
The story begins in 2022, when news media outlets claimed that the truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest was a racist, fascist or far-Right movement. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the convoy “a small fringe minority with unacceptable views” and accused Conservative Members of Parliament of supporting hate. “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag,” Trudeau said.
On February 14th 2022, Trudeau took the extraordinary measure of invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada’s history. The Act gave the Government sweeping powers to arrest protesters, freeze their bank accounts, seize property and dismantle blockades, which is what Trudeau did.
Central to Trudeau’s invocation of the Act was the alleged threat of Right-wing extremism and violence, but new documents that podcaster Jeremy Mackenzie obtained through Canada’s freedom of information law show that this drastic measure was based on fabricated intelligence. What’s more, Canada appears to have shared this disinformation with other members of the Five Eyes alliance. Five Eyes includes Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
There are still many questions about why this happened. We have not received answers from key players involved. Trudeau’s Government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) told Public they would reply to our requests for comment but so far have not.
The New Zealand Police, with whom the Trudeau Government shared disinformation, told Public that it was “unable to comment on queries which seek to confirm whether or not specific individuals or organisations are or have been under police investigation for privacy reasons”.
This scandal appears to add to a growing number of cases revealing the politicisation of intelligence and security agencies across Five Eyes nations to achieve ideological, political and counter-populist goals. But how exactly did the Trudeau Government use falsified evidence to shut down the truckers’ protest? And why are Five Eyes Governments around the world using similar strategies to frame, entrap and demonise populists?
Source and: full article
Original Article: https://davidicke.com/2024/01/26/trudeau-government-faked-intelligence-to-frame-freedom-convoy-truckers-as-violent-extremists-investigation-finds/