Pierre Poilievre Wants an Explanation for Why Convicted Criminal Convoy Leaders Getting Years in Jail is "Justice". Here it is.

Law and order used to be a core Conservative value. Now playing stupid is.

Two of the organizers of Canada’s freedom convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, are facing a possible sentence of seven years for organizing an occupation protest that blocked Canada’s borders and laid siege to downtown Ottawa as well as the Manitoba legislature for weeks. The above was the response of Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

This statement shows that if Pierre Poilievre is not the most wilfully ignorant politicians of his generation, he must be one of the stupidest and most dishonest. He is defending convicted criminals who were responsible for an illegal occupation protest that led to many criminal charges and convictions. In addition to mischief, which is illegally damaging or blocking access to property, there were also charges of obstructing police, disobeying court orders, intimidation, and weapons-related charges.

Poilievre is either playing dumb, or being dumb about the real meanings of “peace” and “mischief” in a legal context, which are significantly different than the words’ everyday use. He should know this: his only job his entire adult life has been as a legislator. Whether you’re in opposition or in government, the actual job of a member of parliament is to creating, debate amending or improve legislation. That is the entire job.

He is comparing three completely different scenarios and in doing so, is ignoring fundamental aspects of justice enshrined in the constitution, the presumption of innocence.

• When Poilievre talks about “violent offenders” being released after charges, he is talking about people who have not been tried or convicted on those charges. The presumption of innocence and due process are fundamental rights that are part of the founding documents of Canada, and date back 800 years to the Magna Carta. It is a cornerstone to individual rights and freedoms of our entire system of justice and government. Here, Poilievre wants to treat an unproven accusation as fact. There are plenty of inquiries into Canadians who were wrongfully convicted and spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit, while the real culprit went free.

• When Poilievre talks about rioters he accuses of antisemitism not facing charges for vandalism, intimidation and blocking traffic, his point is less clear. Is his argument that since anti-semitic protestors aren’t facing criminal sanctions for odious behaviour, that the people who organized the Freedom Convoy should not either? Isn’t that a race to the bottom in terms of public safety? By being vague about who is he talking about, Poilievre can make broad accusations of criminality without being sued. As I have already explained at length, both the Freedom Convoy and campus protestors both make the same false assumption, that freedom of expression is a kind of get out of jail free card. It is not. If Poilievre wants to know why some protestors are being arrested and charged and others are not, he needs to talk to the levels of government that is responsible for the administration of justice and policing in this country: the provinces and municipalities.

• Finally, what’s disturbing about Poilievre’s post and that of his fellow Conservatives, is that while he is attacking people who haven’t yet had due process or been convicted of anything, he’s defending convicted criminals who were been charged, tried and convicted in Canada’s independent judiciary. One National Post contributor, Michael Higgins, described it as “retribution” which is frankly a dangerous and ignorant smear of Canada’s courts. The CPC deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman also tweeted support, as did two CPC MPs who have ties to the organizers. David Bexte is the father of Keean Bexte, who supported the same organizers when they ran the 2019 “Yellow Vest” convoy that was rebranded “United We Roll” to distance themselves from the continual threats of violence, including death threats, towards Liberal politicians. Andrew Lawton, MP, was involved in organizing and promoting the Freedom Convoy

Poilievre is quite literally supporting and defending convicted criminals. It’s shameful for anyone to suggest that there is anything political about holding people to account for crimes they knowingly and deliberately committed and that have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Mischief Can Kill, and When it Does, The Sentence is Life in Prison

Poilievre is, as usual, playing a game with words. Criminal mischief is not someone who is being naughty and mischievous. It’s not because protestors were being irrepressible scamps playing pranks, leaving a flaming paper bag of excrement on the local curmudgeon’s front step.

Mischief has been defined as:

the wilful destruction of property, making it dangerous or useless to others. Section 430 of the Criminal Code deals with the general charge of mischief, with higher penalties for mischief over $5,000. This section of the Code also contains separate charges if your mischief was done with a computer, related to school/educational facilities, war memorials or a cultural property.

Blocking people’s access to property is also considered criminal mischief.

Canada’s criminal code on mischief also sets out the punishments, which recognizes that “mischief” - can lead to people getting hurt or killed. The punishment for that is up to life in prison.

• Punishment

  (2) Every one who commits mischief that causes actual danger to life is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.

• Marginal note:Punishment

  (3) Every one who commits mischief in relation to property that is a testamentary instrument or the value of which exceeds five thousand dollars

  • (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years; or

  • (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

First, I’ll make a point about protesting that I made in an earlier post. Just because a protest does not involve violence, does not mean that it is not disruptive, legal, or safe.

A protestor can be exercising their their constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression, while at the same time doing something that is illegal or hazardous to others, even when it is not violent.

The National Framework For Police Preparedness For Demonstrations And Assemblies makes this clear and even has a sample handout for protestors (below). If you that block people from going about their daily business are not considered “peaceful” - they are disturbing the peace.

The attitude may be that to be effective, protests need to be disruptive. Page 25 of that document makes it clear that “No one has the right to block or disrupt traffic on public highways: Criminal Code, section 423 (1) (g)” See also the highway traffic act.”

The Government of Canada website has noted that, according to the Supreme Court decisions,

"Section 2(c) guarantees the right to peaceful assembly; it does not protect riots and gatherings that seriously disturb the peace: R. v. Lecompte, [2000] J.Q. No. 2452 (Que. C.A.). It has been stated that the right to freedom of assembly, along with freedom of expression, does not include the right to physically impede or blockade lawful activities: Guelph (City) v. Soltys, [2009] O.J. No. 3369 (Ont. Sup. Ct. Jus), at paragraph 26.”

One clear example is that this was a protest where truckers and others were parking their vehicles, blocking streets and highway border crossings. That is a crime under Canada’s Federal Criminal Code, and it is also dangerous, because they can block people’s access to emergency care and necessities, as well as blocking supplies. In Manitoba alone, an elderly brother and sister faced highway delays getting to a rural hospital due to a “slow-rolling protest” and medical supplies for cancer patients and newborns were running low because they were stuck at the border.

When people defend a given protest as “peaceful” they generally seem to mean the typical everyday understanding of the word, which is that there was no violence. Parking a truck is not violent, but it’s not legal nor is it safe.

Under the law, however, if someone is “disturbing the peace” it doesn’t mean they are being violent, or even active. It is being disruptive in ways that disturb other people’s lives and other people’s capacity to go about their business and their day unmolested.

Here, Poilievre is making the same mistake as some of the radical protestors he wants to complain about in his selective outrage.

Lich and Barber led a massive unlawful occupation protest that was crafted to deliberately block borders as well as laying siege to the Nation’s capital and the Manitoba Legislature and a border crossing in Alberta where armed protestors stated their willingness to kill police officers.

In addition to blocking highways, which is in the criminal code, other charges against the occupation participants included

• Disobeying court orders,

• Defacing and excreting on war memorials, and

• Jamming emergency lines.

A number of these are threats to life and health in addition to threats to property, but they are not the only ones. Blocking border crossings put both individuals and the economy at risk. This resulted in shortages of medical supplies flowing into Canada at the Manitoba border crossing. It resulted billions of dollars in lost business for the Canadian economy.

In addition, some of the protest leadership were very clearly and explicitly demanding that the current, democratically elected government be removed from office, and unelected members of the protest be put in government in their stead. There were letters to this effect written to Canada’s Governor General, who represents Canada’s head of state.

To be very clear: these protestors were asking to have the democratically elected government removed, and themselves installed. That is what is known as “a coup.” They were blocking international border crossings with billions of dollars of trade, including food and medical supplies in order to create pressure to do so. The organizers also had attracted a number of followers who routinely made threats of violence towards elected officials.

Pat King, who was peacocking his way across social media, was making videos like these, talking about his criminal convictions and people being shot with live ammunition.

Paid Protestors, Bangladeshi Bots and Conservatives Working with Trump Operatives

The Freedom Convoy was not a spontaneous grassroots demonstration. It took months of planning, involved the same people who ran the 2019 Yellow Vest / United We Roll convoy.

There were Conservatives involved in planning and executing the Convoy. It was an occupation of people who were paid protestors receiving money from other countries with the stated aim of toppling the democratically elected government of Canada. Their Facebook pages for the Convoy were built on pages obtained as the result of identity theft, and companies from Bangladesh were paid to provide fake likes.

They were politically connected, and were advised by Brad Wall, the former Premier of Saskatchewan. Former CPC Leader and Current CPC Leader Andrew Scheer met with Barber as the Convoy drove through Saskatchewan.

• Prominent GOP commenter Candace Owens called for the US to invade Canada, and so did GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

• The international fundraising for the convoy was described as “unprecedented.” and US dollar donors overlapped with donors to Trump.

• Grid.news reported that: “The entity behind some of the largest Facebook groups supporting the protests is an unknown person or persons who used the Facebook account of a Missouri woman. She says her account on the platform was hacked and stolen.

• Further, the Facebook Groups used to promote the occupation were traced to a company in Bangladesh.

“In an interview with Grid after this story first published, Ahasan said Saikot told him he charged the equivalent of $23 per day to promote Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and indicated that he worked with organizers of the protests in Canada on the Freedom Convoy Facebook groups… ”I asked about whether [he was] contacted by someone in Canada,” Ahasan said. “He said ‘Yeah.’”

• On multiple crowdfunding platforms, people from around the globe — often directed to the cause by American far-right influencers like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, who now helps run the FBI. These international donors collectively donated millions of dollars in support of the Canadian movement and started similar crowdfunding campaigns for like-minded protests in U.S. states and European countries.

• The National Observer reported that the “Calls for Trudeau to step down during ‘Freedom Convoy’ traced back to Russian proxy sites”

  

• The role of the U.S. agitators and organizers directly tied to the former Trump organization have to be highlighted, especially considering the repeated statements from Trump aiming at the annexation of Canada.

"[R]ightwing U.S. political figures and content creators … really gave it a boost that made it global,” said Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism and which has been following the Canadian protests against the Covid-19 restrictions.

“Donations from abroad are quite a common part of any large crowdfunding campaign,” he added. “But the scale of this one is unprecedented.”

“Since late January, the likes of Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee have used their large online followings to spread the word about the truckers’ convoy, garnering tens of thousands of engagements including likes, shares and comments on social media posts in favor of the protests, based on data from Crowdtangle, a social media analytics firm owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

… In a post from late January, Eric Trump questioned why media outlets were not discussing the Canadian protests. Franklin Graham, an American evangelical leader, praised the convoy in a post that read: “I love these guys — Canadian truckers standing for freedom.”

• On January 30, 2022 - before the convoy had settled in as an “occupation,” James Menzies of Truck News wrote that “The so-called Freedom Convoy was never about truckers, or border mandates”

The demonstrators are “highly organized, well funded, extremely committed to resisting all attempts to end the demonstrations safely,” said Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly, who added that a “significant element from the United States” was involved in the funding and organization of the truckers’ convoy.

On Telegram, groups with tens of thousands of members routinely swap the latest gossip about how the Canadian protests are going and share tips on how to spread the word beyond the country’s borders.

There are direct ties between the Conservatives and Mike Roman, who worked in the Trump White House during the first term, and for the Koch Intelligence Network prior to that. Roman was in Alberta in 2019 organizing with Andrew Scheer. He is the vice chair of the International Democratic Union, and former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the Chair.

Roman indicted in Georgia and several other states for his key role in trying to overturn the results of the U.S. 2020 election that Joe Biden won. On February 15, 2022, Mike Roman, tweeted this from his account.

Apparently he was in Ottawa during the Convoy Occupation. Roman once wrote “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it.”

There are plenty of similarities between the Freedom Convoy occupation - which demanded the overthrow of the Canadian government - and the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who had been incited by propaganda and lies for which Mike Roman was personally responsible.

The Freedom Convoy was organized and planned with the cooperation of Canadian Conservative politicians, based on propaganda around vaccines, vaccine mandates and around who was actually politically responsible for the policy choices that were hurting people during the pandemic.

With a few exceptions, Canada’s health system and public health response is not run by the Federal Government at all. Even when the Federal government was footing the bill, each province made decisions about vaccines, communications, public health responses as well as economic supports.

Yet the targets of the complaints and threats were all directed at the Federal Government, not the conservative Premiers and governments in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

The occupation protest was designed to create a lose-lose scenario for the governing party.

Demanding that the King’s representative fire the current government and install protestors instead was a non-starter. By refusing to lift their occupation - even in the face of court orders, the whole point was to bait the Federal Government into declaring the Emergencies Act, which could then be used as proof that the Federal Government was the tyrannical and totalitarian entity that propagandists and protestors were claiming.

Instead of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being forced to step down, Conservative MPs fired their own leader, Erin O’Toole, which led to a leadership race that Pierre Poilievre won. The Emergencies Act was by and large found by courts to have been justified, and so were public health orders. One federal judge found that the suspension of some protestors’ bank accounts violated their Charter Rights, which is being appealed by the Federal Government.

Given the context - that there was an unprecedented international effort to funnel foreign funds to protestors who were crippling the capacity of governments and the economy to funcation, one can only hope that Canada’s Supreme Court recognizes that a temporary suspension of access to a bank account filled with donations from Russia and the U.S. is a reasonable step to take when provincial and municipal authorities and police have proven unable to maintain the peace.

There’s a principle when it comes to justice that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” If you kill someone, it doesn’t matter if you didn’t know that murder was illegal. When it comes to politicians like Poilievre, there is no excuse for his ignorance of the law. What he’s preaching undermines justice and the law, and not just because he’s supporting convicted criminals.

Where’s the justice in that?

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DFL