Let’s remember the Freedom Convoy and why we might need another one
I wasn’t sure I wanted to head out of a cold January night in 2022 and greet the arrival of thousands of trucks and protesters into Ottawa. I hate winter. My extremities tend to get cold and frostbitten in temperatures below -10 degrees C even if I’m wearing warm socks and gloves. I knew I would have to use my bare hands to take pictures and videos with my smartphone. I didn’t relish standing around on the street talking to other cold people.
But I went anyway because, well, I had a feeling that history was in the making and I wanted not only to be a part of it but to report on it. The weather be damned.
Ultimately, I headed out to the downtown core of Ottawa almost every night for the next few weeks. Sometimes I went twice a day. I was always late for or missed the news conferences that the Freedom Convoy organizers “scheduled,” because if you weren’t constantly watching social media, you missed the notification that such a session was being planned. I finally managed to arrange an hour with “Big Red,” or Chris Barber, one of the more prominent of the convoy personalities. Notice I didn’t say “leader” because that is the moniker that the Crown tried to apply to Barber as well as Tamara Lich during their two-year trial for “mischief.” More about that later. But I found Barber to be a reasonable, articulate and humble man who explained why he was so involved in this protest.
Chris Barber and Tamara Lich outside Ottawa courthouse August 2024. Their ongoing trial is the longest in Canadian history for the charge of “mischief”.
And what was this protest all about? It was the first truly national protest against the COVID mandates in any country. It was about saying no to authoritarian governments that dispensed an untested and experimental vaccine on their citizenry and punished those who refused to submit to this bio-weapon by taking away their jobs, their free assembly, their ability to travel – and yes, even their speech. It wasn't just that you had to accept the lockdowns along with invasive governments and bureaucracies, you had to pretend you agreed with it all and liked it. The Freedom Convoy proclaimed a resounding rejection of this status quo and demanded the state step back and get its hands off our lives, our families, our children.
There was hope in the air and proof on the streets that the government could force us to comply. It was refreshing to walk the streets of Ottawa and feel energized by the freedom that pulsed from every corner. I had already received the vaccine twice before the protest – not because I wanted to, but because I regrettably felt I had to if I wanted to work and visit my mother’s nursing home.
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I had read about how the vaccine was potentially dangerous and how it was engendering opposition from many people who believed it should be a choice whether to receive it or not. But I didn’t think it was going to be dangerous for me, I suppose in the same way that some people smoke for decades knowing that tobacco causes cancer and heart disease but in OTHER PEOPLE. That won’t happen to me. I was furious about the mandates but not yet angry enough that I had been coerced into taking the vax. It wasn’t until after the pandemic was over that I started to realize just what I had done. It wasn’t until I lost a family member to sudden pneumonia and another’s dementia worsened that I really understood that I had made a grievous error in submitting.
But the Freedom Convoy did spell the end of the mandates by pushing the provinces to back off on the insane rules they were dictating. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hated the protesters from the first day they arrived in Ottawa, and he smeared every one of them as misogynists and racists and even flag-carrying Nazis. It was the same sort of projection and hypocrisy from a man who had performed blackface for much of his adult life and chronically demonstrated that he viewed women in the workplace or in his social life as objects to be scorned, abused and ignored.
He invoked the Emergencies Act – just as inappropriately as his father had invoked the War Measures Act in October 1970 – with a degree of relish and joy that was disgusting. He froze the bank accounts of not only protesters but their supporters like it was his divine right to do so. Nonetheless, Trudeau lost.
But mistakenly, many think it is Trudeau who has levied lawfare against those charged with “leading” or encouraging the Freedom Convoy. The legal response has actually been initiated at the provincial level, whether in Alberta at those involved in the Coutts border crossing blockade or in Ontario for those charged with organizing or leading the Ottawa protest. I am most familiar with the ordeal of Chris Barber and Tamara Lich because I have faithfully attended their trial and recounted the day’s events in reports that have largely all appeared in The Post Millennial and my own independent journalism.
Chris Barber’s truck Big Red.
Never in the field of legal conflict has so small an alleged crime taken so long to assess with so few shreds of evidence. Barber and Lich are both essentially charged with mischief, the sort of crime that usually occurs when a wedding reception is marred by a drunken brawl and, if any offenders are actually charged, they are dealt with outside of a courtroom.
Let us hope and pray for a verdict of innocent when Chris and Tamara return to Ottawa in March.
But it may be time for another Freedom Convoy because this time the Trudeau government has prorogued Parliament to stop a general election, so it can have a Liberal leadership race and continue to gaslight Canadians. This corrupt, invasive and inept regime could well stay in power until October 2026 if it chooses to simply ignore legislation that insists federal elections occur every four years and falls back on the Constitutional backstop of five years.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is about to slap a 25% tariff on all Canadian products while Trudeau and his gang have done absolutely nothing to alleviate the problem that precipitated the tariff: border security. Of course, Trudeau is quietly and privately welcoming the tariff and wants a trade war with the US because this allows him to frame the next election as a battle between Liberal-lead Canada and Trump’s US. Neither Trudeau nor this potential successors Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland want to run against the Conservative Party of Canada and its leader Pierre Poilievre. They want to take on Trump – but more about that tomorrow.
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True,that! Look at the UK, in streets for Tommy Robinson a hero and patriot and one tough fellow.
We have our fair share of tough and unfairly persecuted and prosecuted here in Chinada.
Reform it or divide and gp Republic. With real laws that fight corruption.
Imho parliamentary democracy is a big fail as we can see.
Star 51.🙏🇺🇲
Time for another March against the WHO and WEF! Need our personal freedoms back!