While thousands of serious criminal cases across Canada are dropped merely due to delays, many Convoy-related prosecutions on trivial charges continue more than three-and-a-half years later. The cases of Freedom Convoy truckers (left to right) Bern Bueckert, Clayton McAllister and Csaba Vizi (whose Volvo is shown at bottom) are still not fully resolved. (Sources of photos: (top left and right) screenshots from documentary Unacceptable?; (top middle) ThankYouTruckers.Substack; (bottom) Donna Laframboise)

By Donna Laframboise

On September 8, three and a half years after the 2022 Freedom Convoy departed Ottawa, and five long, stressful months after his trial actually ended, Robert Dinel walked out of court a free man.

Dinel, a Quebec heavy equipment operator who’d behaved entirely peacefully during the protest over Covid restrictions, had been charged with mischief and obstruction of police. Court proceedings were repeatedly delayed — four times alone just this year — until judge Matthew Webber of the Ontario Court of Justice finally stayed the charges on the grounds that Dinel’s Charter rights to a timely trial had been violated.

For Dinel, it was a relief. For Canadians concerned about freedom and justice, his legal ordeal was yet another example of a system gone off the rails.

Most Canadians are aware of the trials of convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, which ended in conviction; they are to be sentenced in October. Few may realize that many more protestors were charged, most for the relatively innocuous infraction of mischief, and have had their cases drag on and on through the courts for more than three years.

The record of Canada’s legal system clearly shows that mischief charges are routinely withdrawn before scarce and expensive court time is expended on relative trivialities. But when it comes to the truckers, the Crown attorneys at the Ottawa courthouse – employees of the Government of Ontario, not the federal government – appear to have lost all perspective. They are on a mission. The sheer intensity of the prosecution of Convoy members looks less like the fair administration of justice than revenge upon people who dared protest the arbitrary and oppressive measures of the Covid years.

The initial police crackdown itself was a mess. Those arrested were passed from police officer to police officer. Officials writing up the paperwork had no direct knowledge of what had actually transpired; extra charges appear to have been tacked on willy nilly. In Dinel’s case, the prosecution doesn’t even know the identity of the tactical officer who pointed a gun at his head and hauled him out of his vehicle on February 18, 2022.

In a police processing trailer four hours after his arrest, Dinel received a medical assessment from a paramedic. Seated and hand-cuffed throughout, the five-foot-three Dinel calmly and repeatedly told police he was in no fit state to be making decisions and that he wanted to speak to a lawyer. “I want to know what I’m signing,” he insisted. But the police officers, who outnumbered him ten-to-one, kept pushing him to sign an undertaking that he wouldn’t return to the protest area. The fact he never got his phone call – that he was denied his Charter right “to retain and instruct [legal] counsel without delay” – should have stopped this case in its tracks. The Crown chose to pursue it, anyway.

A week after Dinel’s mother died in July 2023, he suffered the first of four strokes. In December 2023, one occurred in the courtroom. “My whole face just seized up,” he recalls. “I had another stroke. My whole face drooped, then the judge freaked right out.” An ambulance was summoned and his trial was adjourned. “I hate court,” says Dinel. “It’s hard, you know. It’s stressful, it’s exhausting.” Rather than staying the charges on  compassionate grounds, the prosecution continued, with Dinel accompanied by a service dog.

Nova Scotia trucker Guy Meister spent hours in the same paddy wagon as Dinel the day they were arrested. After travelling from his Nova Scotia home to Ottawa for court appearances more than a dozen times – at considerable expense – in May of this year Meister was found guilty of mischief, but not of obstructing police. In late July, he was sentenced to 20 hours of community service, six months’ probation, and ordered to pay a $100 victim surcharge.

The trial for Windsor, Ontario trucker Csaba Vizi began just this month, the same day Robert Dinel’s charges were stayed. Video broadcast around the world in February 2022 shows him being assaulted by multiple police officers after he’d exited his truck and knelt down in the snow with his hands behind his head. None of those officers were themselves charged following this violence. None were forced to raise tens of thousands in lawyers’ fees, as Vizi has. Even protesters who have endured the stress of a trial and been acquitted have still not always walked free and clear, because the Crown has often insisted on filing appeals. As a result, defence lawyers routinely advise Freedom Convoy protesters that their legal nightmare isn’t actually over until an additional 30 days have come and gone. In one instance, the Crown waited until the last afternoon of the last permissible day to file its appeal.

These are just a few examples of what’s been going on in Canada’s justice system, one already beset by long delays for cases involving far more serious crimes. Credible news reports suggest that the majority of criminal cases in Ontario aren’t even making it to trial, with sexual assault
charges dropped because of delays. Yet the Convoy prosecutions continue.

Many people insist Covid is over, that we should all move on. But the legal persecution of the truckers who bravely protested government overreach in the bitter winter of early 2022 is far from over.

Donna Laframboise is an independent journalist and photographer. A former vice-president of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, she is the author of Thank You, Truckers! Canada’s Heroes & Those Who Helped Them.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenged the record of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the COVID-19 pandemic and the precipitous rise in chronic disease in the U.S. as he defended his shakeup of the health agency at a Senate hearing Thursday.

“These changes were absolutely necessary to restore the CDC’s role as the world’s gold standard public health with a central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease,” Kennedy said. “CDC failed that responsibility miserably during COVID when its disastrous and nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools and caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science and heightened economic inequality.”

The combative hearing follows Kennedy’s high-profile showdown with former CDC Director Susan Monarez last week. Kennedy ousted Monarez from the post on Aug. 25, less than a month into her tenure, over a dispute about his overhaul of the committee that advises the CDC on vaccine schedules.

In a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Democrats and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana criticized Kennedy for his actions to remake the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), as well as changes by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to COVID-19 vaccine approvals. They lambasted Kennedy as undermining confidence in vaccines and in established science.

“I’m approaching this as a doctor, not as a senator. I am concerned about children’s health, seniors’ health, all of our health. And I applaud you for joining the president in a call for radical transparency,” said Cassidy, referring to President Donald Trump’s call on Truth Social for COVID vaccine manufacturers to make data more readily available.

Cassidy last week appeared to side with Monarez in her dustup with Kennedy, urging physicians to ignore the ACIP’s recommendations.

Monarez alleged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published hours before the hearing that Kennedy had pressured her to preapprove the outcome of an ACIP meeting scheduled for Sept. 18-19. Kennedy said that the op-ed amounted to a lie. He denied having a private meeting with her in which he asked her to leave.

Kennedy dismissed criticism of the changes to the ACIP from the American Academy of Pediatrics, pointing to the association’s pharmaceutical ties. Kennedy also cited a 2000 congressional investigation into physicians and scientists serving on the committee with financial stakes in the drugmakers they oversaw.

“I didn’t politicize ACIP, I depoliticized it,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy answered the broader criticism with a scathing referendum of the CDC’s actions during the COVID pandemic and insisted the agency should focus on its original mission of protecting Americans from infectious diseases. Kennedy added the agency requires “new blood” in light of the CDC’s “catastrophically bad judgement” during the pandemic.

“The U.S. is home to 4.2% of the world’s population yet we had nearly 20% of the COVID deaths,” Kennedy said. “The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”

Kennedy also questioned whether the CDC was complacent amid a precipitous rise in rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

“CDC’s job was to make sure this didn’t happen,” he said.

Sometimes Kennedy also directly challenged the records of individual senators on the panel, including Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Kennedy accused Wyden of overseeing a rise in childhood chronic disease from a position of influence over American health care.

“Senator you’ve sat in that chair for how long? Twenty, twenty-five years? While the chronic diseases in our children went up to 76%. And you said nothing,” Kennedy said.

Wyden has served on the Finance Committee, which shares jurisdiction over health policy issues, since 1996.

Kennedy also named a litany of HHS priorities addressed since his February confirmation, asserting that his brief tenure has been among the most productive in history on issues ranging from food dyes, baby formula, fluoride in tap water, 7-OH or “gas station heroin,” drug prices, the “GRAS” loophole, reducing animal testing, ending gain-of-function research, FDA drug approvals and ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Kennedy also opened his testimony by expressing sympathy for the family of Dekalb County police officer David Rose who died by gunshot in an attack on CDC headquarters.

Pullback Of COVID Vaccines In Perpetuity

Several senators criticized a new FDA framework to require new clinical trial data for annual COVID-19 booster shots for healthy adults and children. Democrats portrayed the move as a betrayal of Kennedy’s promise at confirmation hearings earlier this year to not restrict access to vaccines. People can continue to seek the vaccine off-label, but the HHS actions limit insurance coverage.

Kennedy reminded the panel that two top vaccine regulators at the FDA during the Biden administration, Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, departed the agency in response to pressure to approve a boosters-for-all strategy without this clinical evidence in 2021. 

The hearing also occasionally delved into other more contentious topics where Kennedy diverges from many Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Chuck Grassley sought reassurance from Kennedy, a frequent critic of genetically modified crops, synthetic pesticides and their manufacturers, that he would let the U.S. Department of Agriculture lead regulation of agriculture. Kennedy agreed and added that he was working with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on certain priorities.

Kennedy also alleged the CDC buried evidence of an association between the Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in children, which could land him in hot water with a broader coalition of lawmakers.