Just days after the Million Person March against LGBT propaganda in schools swept the nation, the town of Waterloo, Ontario, is considering a bylaw prohibiting any communication on municipal property that could make LGBT-identifying people “feel harassed.”
On Wednesday, September 29, Waterloo Regional Councillors will vote on a bylaw to ban any communication on publicly-owned property which could make someone who identifies as LGBT “feel harassed,” “offended” or “troubled.”
Traditionally, states controlled the behaviour of their subjects through the creation of crimes. This often took the form of a prohibitive ‘thou shalt not’ or ‘if someone does X, they will get Y punishment’. From the earliest laws and codes, a crime was a prohibited act with a resulting punishment.
OTTAWA — Evidence in the trial of two “Freedom Convoy” organizers suggests city staff did not give protest organizers or their lawyers a heads-up about plans to file a court injunction against demonstrators.
A court in Alberta, Canada, sentenced Pastor Artur Pawlowski on Monday to 60 days in prison for a speech to Freedom Convoy truckers in February 2022 in which he supported their protests against repressive lockdown, vaccine, and other mandates related to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
OTTAWA—Protesters at the Freedom Convoy demonstrations in Ottawa pushed back against police officers attempting to remove them and refused to leave, according to the testimony of a Quebec police officer at the trial of protest organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.
“The reason that we were going slowly is because it was a heavy presence of demonstrators that prevented us from moving forward,” Captain Etienne Martel with Sûreté du Québec testified in court on Sept. 18.
OTTAWA – As thousands of demonstrators clogged the streets around Parliament Hill in early 2022, many of them had phones in hand, taking video of the different scenes around them for almost three weeks.
For some participants, the “Freedom Convoy” protests had a festival-like atmosphere. For those who weren’t part of the fun, it felt more like an occupation.
A team of stressed RCMP staff Googled news media articles to quote right back to news media after the public safety minister told reporters to direct their questions to law enforcement: Lawyer and investigative journalist.
OTTAWA, Ont. – A Freedom of Information request reveals that law enforcement may have used ambiguous information about Canadian Forces veteran Jeremy MacKenzie and Diagolon, which in large part, led to the federal government invoking the Emergencies Act, say two investigative journalists.
Through Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPOP), independent journalists Caryma Sa’d and Elisa Hategan obtained 1,000 pages of internal RCMP documents on MacKenzie and Diagolon. The documents show that although the RCMP were investigating Diagolon, they didn’t consider them a group, a militia, or a security threat.
A long but revealing read examining how manufacturing hate to criminalize dissent became standard practice with the Liberal government, its media minions, their willing collaborators in law enforcement and the usual suspect NGO’s.
It is disturbing how easily an extreme left political vendetta can be palmed off as an anti-hate crusade based on the dubious “expertise” of a few self-appointed guardians of social cohesion.
These practices were first institutionalized in human rights commissions in Canada and have now spread throughout society to include professional licensing boards and our financial system.
Who can forget Freeland’s schoolgirl cackling on revealing the Trudeau government unpersoned trucker convoy enemies of the state?
And now for a little comic relief courtesy Rachel Gilmore.
https://t.co/0fwm7gaCpr pic.twitter.com/vUmNK6bizN
— Rachel Gilmore (@atRachelGilmore) September 13, 2023
I’ve started calling it the Freedom Trial. Yes, it’s the much-anticipated trial of Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. Both are on trial for a myriad of absurd charges: mischief, counselling others to commit mischief, intimidation, and obstructing police. These are the sort of legal entanglement usually reserved for people who get drunk and begin acting up in a most uncivil manner.
Pro-medical freedom Alberta lawyer Eva Chipiuk has contended that the trial against Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber is really motivated by a desire to have Canadians who opposed COVID mandates be “vilified” in the public sphere.
The lawyers defending two of the most prominent organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” protests are expected to make their case today to block nine Ottawa residents and business representatives from taking the stand.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are on trial for criminal charges related to their role in the demonstration, which blockaded Ottawa city streets for weeks last year as protestors railed against COVID-19 public health measures.
Will Tamara Lich receive a fair trial for the charges she faces in relation to organizing the Freedom Convoy? It would be nice to think that in a country such as Canada the question is a ridiculous one because justice here will always be fair.
Yet both the intense politicization of the events surrounding the convoy and Lich’s own experience the past year with the justice system indicate that the question of fairness is now basically a coin toss.
Frustrations boiled over at the criminal trial of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber on Friday after defence counsel raised concerns with the presiding judge about timing of disclosures from the Crown.
Justice Heather Perkins-McKey called a recess on Friday morning after she told the Crown she was “very unhappy” about the timing of the release of text messages to the defence.
The judge’s decision came after Mr. Barber’s lawyer, Diane Magas, said the prosecution disclosed this week which text messages it intended to focus on in court from an original stack of 4,000 pages.
This week, the trial of Canada’s two main leaders of the trucker protests began. The lead prosecutor has argued that Tamara Lich and Chris Barber “crossed the line” and “committed multiple crimes” while insisting that this trial will not be about the truckers’ political views. The pair face charges including mischief, counselling others to commit mischief, intimidation, and obstructing the police. They face a maximum of 10 years in prison should they be convicted.
A senior Ottawa police officer who helped oversee operational plans in the early days of what became known as the “Freedom Convoy” says the number of people and vehicles in the downtown core “exceeded expectations.”
Insp. Russell Lucas, the incident commander managing the convoy’s impacts, made those remarks while testifying on the second day of the criminal trial for two of the main convoy organizers.
The charges against Tamara Lich and Chris Barber include mischief, counselling others to commit mischief, intimidation and obstructing police.
Tamara Lich, the Freedom Convoy leader whose trial begins this week, is no hero. She led a protest movement that illegally occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks, blocking access to roads and local businesses. Though largely nonviolent, the convoy was an extreme nuisance that went beyond the mere inconvenience expected of a large demonstration. But, if Lich is no hero, neither is she a terrorist, insurrectionist leader or fascist plotter, as so many of her critics in the media and the Liberal party desperately want her to be.
