Gord Macgill, Trucker – NEWSWEEK July 12, 2023
It’s been 18 months since Canada’s Freedom Convoy rocked the world, when truckers from all corners of Canada descended on Ottawa to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s vindictive and punishing vaccine mandates. The three-week long protest was a joyous expression of human solidarity in the face of two years of ginned up moral panic and psychological warfare perpetrated against Canadians by their own government, and the shockwaves were felt throughout the world—both from the power of the protest and the vicious response to it by Trudeau.
While the Convoy was still hundreds of kilometers from Ottawa, Trudeau’s Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendocino, was planning a media campaign deploying “a similar message to the one used in response to the Jan. 6 attacks in Washington, D.C.” which would emphasize the “more extreme elements” of the protestors. Trudeau memed himself into believing that a January 6 type insurrection was about to storm Parliament Hill, and promptly vacated the city to hide at a chalet in rural Quebec, where he remained for several days.
The Freedom Convoy did not deliver on any of these manufactured concerns. In the three weeks of the protest, not a single violent act was committed. The protesters cleaned the streets of Ottawa and fed the homeless, and the weekends were raucous and joyful, with techno dance parties in the streets lasting into the wee hours.
Against such revelry, Trudeau invoked The Emergencies Act, which allows the Canadian government to suspend civil liberties in the face of a so-called state of emergency. The invocation brought an end to the protests and launched a Kafkaesque nightmare for many who were involved. Bank accounts were seized and funds confiscated. Tamara Lich was arrested, and still faces charges of “counseling mischief” for her role organizing the protest. And four others—Chris Lysak, Chris Carbert, Anthony (Tony) Olienick, and Jerry Morin—have been held without a trial and without bail for charges related to “conspiracy to commit murder” against Canadian police officers at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing.
These are serious charges, which should imply serious evidence presented at an expeditious trial; yet at time of writing, it has been 515 days since these men were arrested, and no trial has yet taken place.
Worse, the evidence on offer is vague and ambiguous: text messages, testimony from two undercover RCMP officers working the crowd at the Coutts protest site, and a widely circulated photo of allegedly confiscated weapons that provided the main justification for the invocation of The Emergencies Act.
Whatever the charges against them, the denial of bail is an egregious departure from the norm, and has been given no explanation. As Donald Best, a former detective and 15 year veteran of the Toronto Police Services, pointed out, everybody gets bail in Canada, including a suspect accused of the first degree murder of a Toronto Police Officer and, somewhat ironically, a member of Antifa who drove his jeep into a Freedom Convoy protest site in Winnipeg, Manitoba, injuring four people.
Yet there’s no bail set for the Coutts Four, whose most recent pre-trial hearing was on June 29th, and another isn’t scheduled until July 25th, where it is believed that the actual trial date will be set for some time in 2024.
These are political prisoners, pure and simple. They are being denied basic rights due to even the most violent of criminals because they are on the wrong side of the Trudeau government. They are being used as a fig leaf, the last shred of Trudeau’s legitimacy for invoking The Emergencies Act and for the massive overreach of freezing bank accounts and seizing assets that it incurred.
It seems that Trudeau is determined not only to smear the Convoy as a Jan. 6 Canadian redo, but to treat the Coutts Four in a similar way, depriving them of their civil rights as the United States did to many protesters arrested in the days and weeks following that fateful day in D.C. Hundreds spent over a year in Guantanamo Bay-like conditions in D.C. prisons, denied bail and treated worse than convicted rapists and serial killers. As American Greatness reporter Julie Kelly chronicled at length, much of this treatment was utterly political in nature. But few in Canada are willing to expose our version of these abuses.
Margaret “Granny” Mackay of Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta is one of them. Mackay is the creator and administrator of the Alberta Political Prisoners Facebook page and is in regular contact with the accused and their legal team. Mackay has highlighted the subpar treatment the men have received in remand, including being held in segregation, a polite term for the torture known as solitary confinement; having necessary medical treatment delayed; being denied supplements for treating specific health issues; and being granted extremely limited visitation time from family.
Did they commit crimes worthy of such treatment? We just don’t know. As Mackay has maintained through all of this, “I’m after the truth. The truth is locked in a remand center right now, and it’s not being allowed out.”
As Jason Lavigne, an independent journalist in western Alberta, put it, “There is an inverted house of cards Trudeau, Mendocino, Rouleau, all of these people have built, and at the bottom are the Coutts 4.” If these men are exonerated, Canadians will start demanding answers about a whole lot of other things.
Using protesters and captives as examples is nothing new in the long history of government, but in places like Canada and the United States, leaders like Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden love to invoke freedom and transparency ad nauseum and publicly hector the leaders of other countries over their treatment of dissidents. So it’s disappointing to say the least to see such disregard for civil rights on these shores—rounding up regular working class people and accusing them of the most heinous crimes, then denying them speedy trials and treating them as if convicted terrorists before any evidence has been adjudicated.
These old school civil rights abuses cropping up in Biden’s America and Trudeau’s Canada are the latest technique that the globalist technocrats have used to quell the worldwide resurgence of populism, from Donald Trump to Brexit to the Yellow Vests to the Dutch Farmers to the Freedom Convoy.
The Coutts Four are the last of Trudeau’s political enemies whom he can punish with impunity; they have no power and the full weight of the state against them. If his government can allow murderers and terrorists out on bail, they should extend the same to the men from Coutts and get on with the trial. Canada ought not be a nation where the works of Kafka and Camus play out in reality.
We don’t yet know if these men are innocent or guilty of the charges against them, but it flies in the face of justice that they have not yet faced trial and have been denied bail. Locking people up for extended periods like this without trial is the stuff of banana republics.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.
The author of this article failed to mention similar or worse situations in New Zealand and Australia as well.
The UK should thank the stars for making those in 10 Downing throw a party and hence betrayed the farce the whole thing was, and the stolen phone of the Health official that had his WhatsApp messages otherwise it too would have gone the same route as its other English speaking nations.
How is helping to destroy Germany working out for them?
“Canada is an example of how the West is descending into totalitarianism.”
Descending? Descended long ago I’d say.
“Early last year Canadian truckers led protests against punishing Covid vaccine mandates.”
No they didn’t. They wanted to drive their trucks into america because that’s where the big money was. It was, as always, about money.
“Locking people up for extended periods like this without trial is the stuff of banana republics.”
Julian Assange anyone? Normally, the british fascists just kill their opposition and claim the russians did it with an umbrella. But I wonder how the writer can reconcile the above with his “the three-week long protest was a joyous expression of human solidarity”. Solidarity? Like ice cream on a hot day, your “solidarity” disappears the moment it gets too hot.
Look, Canada was a lost cause long before the truckers.
You know how the English Nazis in Westminster used Scotland as a test zone for wider policies? Well, Canada is a test zone for Nazi NATO policies. Canada even has legislation that will block Canadian YouTuber content for being seen outside of Canada, and we’re not talking about political content. This is North Korea level control.
Even when lockdowns were lifted, you had to show you papers and jab records in order to travel within Canada… fecking Nazis!!!!
Next time, they will do this in the UK, even when no lockdown in effect, because it’s been tested in Canada.
Just one question. Why/how did Canadians come to vote for Trudeau anyway? Did he not show his true colors before? Is it not known that both he and his father were both avowed communists? Do citizens’ votes count or does the vote counter swing elections?
The big problem with Justine Tradeau is that he is not a bona-fide, villainous bad man. No, he is a snide, posing, nasty little piss-pants. This is more than just an ad homonym attack because the reality of the Canadian PM really wrecks his optics, leaving his audience confused and disoriented. How the hell can Evil be enforced and administered by such a twat? Many people admit to being surprised that this dickweed is rather large and robust of physique, a fact that only becomes evident when men of normal size stand next to him. When observed alone, at a podium for instance, he appears to be quite diminutive. Only in Canada, I suppose.
‘Democracy’ is the temporary cessation of Civil War. And the delusion of freedom allows for the illusion of democracy. So it has always been. So it will always be.
@ Sigg Huyl. Yes, as far as we can tell, citizens votes ‘do’ count, and Canadians as individuals are such commies (extreme socialists) that they actually voted for him…. sort of. Actually, two opposing parties, Liberals and New Democrats (a totally communist party). each representing opposing views, actually added their low votes together, and the New Democrats supported Turdeau. He had less than 20% of the vote when he ‘won’. The conservatives, the 3rd ‘wing’ of mainstream parties actually won the most votes, but they ‘lost’ the election due to the above finagling. Canada, BTW, is not a country. In Justin Trudeau’s own words, it is a “post national state”. But as long as Canadians get their handouts and healthcare, they follow the sheep to the slaughterhouse. Sad, because it is a truly blessed country!
This stuff about voting. Even if you want to claim that the votes are counted correctly, you’ve still got either jew A or jew B as your dictator. “Elections” that only have “candidates” that are scum are pointless, unless you’re a jew.
Why is Jones going on about nazis? Is it someone impersonating him? Or is he drunk? If I remember right, he used to throw in the odd “communist” nonsense, but I don’t remember nazis all over the place. Both are wrong of course. Britiain is a jew shitehole – all the rich are jews and all the non jews are poor.
Yeah we know, Trudeau is a prick, a wanker and most obvious a commie. But to try and use civil liberties and civil rights against him and the government is a joke. Civil liberties and civil rights mean nothing especially going into the future. They were granted by the government in the first place a government that writes the law to suit itself at anytime in history.
Civil liberties and civil rights aren’t written by the citizens are they.
Fact is when you’re born the only right you have is the right to breath.