“Criminalizing Dissent”

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.

Newsweek picked up Donald Best’s story.

During the Freedom Convoy protest that took place in downtown Ottawa in early 2022, Public Safety Canada issued a false bulletin claiming that protesters were ransacking federal office buildings, according to records obtained through an access to information request.

On June 5, Alexander Cohen, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, said the department had no involvement in the bulletin sent out by the Government Operations Centre, which is a division of Public Safety Canada.

Sounds more and more like a criminal conspiracy to deny human rights.

The public made 410 complaints about police officer conduct during the “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations in Ottawa last year, but nearly all of them were dismissed.

The Ottawa police board’s 2022 annual report says public complaints nearly doubled from the previous year, with an 88-per-cent increase overall, and 94 per cent more complaints relating to police conduct.

“There’s a storm coming,” popular historian turned esoteric political commentator Neil Oliver posted on Twitter in May, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But there’s a storm coming.” As Mr. Oliver is a Scotsman who calls himself “the Coast Guy,” some of his followers might have thought he was referring to the weather. Others more acquainted with the tropes of modern conspiratorial thought, though, will see the reference to a “storm” as a reference to a time of social and political crisis. It comes — whether Mr. Oliver knows it or not — from the fevered discourse of QAnon.

Two men charged in connection with last year’s convoy protest are expected to apply for a second time to have their trials heard somewhere outside Ottawa.

Former MPP Randy Hillier and protest organizer Pat King were granted the right to re-apply for a change of venue in recent decisions issued by Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips. He set aside earlier decisions, issued April 26, that summarily dismissed those applications.