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C2C Journal

Resistance Theory: The Freedom Convoy’s Place in our Divided History

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39 minute read

If there is a politico-historical thread running from Louis Riel and the buffalo-hunting Métis rebels in Confederation-era Manitoba, via Ottawa’s creation of three second-class Prairie provinces, followed by decades of friction over resource ownership and taxation, all the way to the convoys of diesel-powered trucks that rumbled into Ottawa to protest federal vaccine mandates in the winter of 2022, few have taken note. David Solway is one. As the main convoy leaders await a court verdict, Solway is taking the long view. He asserts that the truckers’ protest is a powerful contemporary manifestation of a recurring theme – perhaps the defining theme – of how Canada is governed, and to whose benefit. But while Canada’s late-19th century leaders were flawed men who made mistakes, Solway finds, the country’s current federal leadership appears outright bent on destruction.

Canadian society has evolved since 1867, but the basic outline of our national political institutions has not. As was the case in 1867, these institutions still lack the capacity to accommodate regional circumstances and regional equality.

The winter 2022 truckers’ protest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s punitive vaccine mandates that shook Canada to its foundations no longer dominates the headlines. But it remains in public consciousness. Prominent protest members were recently convicted or are still on trial. Its implications are still with us and its long-term effects may well be seismic. The Freedom Convoy traversed the country from Prince Rupert, British Columbia to the nation’s capital in Ottawa to protest the biggest experiment ever in authoritarian rule over Canadians. The truckers and their fellow convoy travellers demanded the attention of a disgraceful prime minister, the abolition of the vaccine mandates, and the restoration of the tenets of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that had been abused by the prime minister, his cabinet, his bought-and-paid for media mercenaries, and his penchant judiciary.

Writing in C2C Journal, Gwyn Morgan reviews the origins of the event: “Just as the provinces were ending restrictions on the unvaccinated, the Prime Minister proclaimed that returning unvaccinated truckers would be required to ‘quarantine’ for two weeks, a condition that would be impossible to meet.” After two years of dutifully serving their country, Morgan writes, “the truckers were to be thrown out of work – cast aside like unneeded accoutrements.”

The February 2022 Freedom Convoy sought an audience with the prime minister to push for the reversal of vaccine mandates, but while the protest was entirely peaceful and at times even festive, the truckers faced harsh treatment; many were arrested and some remain in prison today. (Sources of photos: (top left) Emilijaknezevic, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (top right and middle) Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (bottom) Ross Dunn, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

In reaction to official disregard amounting to scorn, vast columns of rigs and trucks “drove along thousands of kilometres of wintery roads to converge upon the nation’s Capital to protest in front of its Parliament buildings. The atmosphere was peaceful, even celebratory. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to meet with the blue-collar truckers, whom he slandered as vandals, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and more,” finally invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act (successor to the almost-never-used War Measures Act) to crush the protesters.

Two years later, little has changed in Canada. Coming to the defence of a trucker, Jay Vanderwier, who had parked his rig during the protest where police had directed him, who later submitted peacefully to an arrest done unnecessarily at gunpoint, and who was recently convicted of two criminal counts of mischief by a pliable, Liberal-friendly judiciary, former Conservative MP Derek Sloan recalls that when other protesters have come to Ottawa, mainly First Nations officials, “Trudeau would gladly meet them, take a knee, drop the flag to half-mast for months on end, issue endless apologies, and more. But when these honest, hard-working Canadians came to Ottawa, he showed nothing but contempt. [H]e tried to paint them as violent extremists and seditionists.” Though less famous than protesters Tamara Lich, Chris Barber or Pat King, Vanderwier – like other equally unsung protesters – was just as committed, put just as much at risk and has suffered similarly.

Not a glowing CV: Having “never done what most people would consider a full day’s work in his life,” Justin Trudeau’s pre-office record of achievement featured being a substitute drama teacher and snowboard instructor with an apparent passion for costume parties.

And Trudeau is still on the warpath. This is a prime minister, says former Calgary Herald editor David Marsden with considerable justification, who has “never done what most people would consider a full day’s work in his life.” He certainly never sat in the cab of a semi. He certainly never raised cattle, worked on a farm, hauled timber, fished the rivers, or risked his life on an oil rig. He never tried to start a restaurant or open a business. He’s never had to meet a payroll when money was tight, or negotiate with investors and creditors. He has never excelled in any professional capacity. He has never brought a new product to market, or sold anything except his own brand. The son of a former prime minister and the beneficiary of a family trust, he did a stint of substitute teaching and was a snowboard instructor. Not a glowing CV.

“The prime minister doesn’t like Alberta,” Marsden continues, “His government policies have been designed to bring the province to its knees. He swallowed the Pollyanna spittle [about green energy saving the world] being peddled by his environment minister,” the ineffable Steven Guilbeault who, along with deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, is part of the figurative three-headed Cerberus that guards the gates of Canada’s political underworld.

In essence, Trudeau is the perfect exemplar of the Eastern anointed class, the so-called Laurentian Elite (or Laurentian Consensus)a term coined in its modern sense a dozen years ago by John Ibbitson in the Literary Review of Canada and elaborated in his book, The Big Shift, co-authored with Darrell Bricker. Defined as “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central-east Canada, the term draws upon the much older “Laurentian School” of thought concerning Canada’s founding structure and originating purpose developed by mainstream (Eastern Canadian) historians like Donald Creighton. Ibbitson floated an early and rather exaggerated conviction of Laurentian collapse at a time when Justin Trudeau was a Liberal apparition planning his triumphal future and that of his Laurentian cohorts. Interestingly, The Big Shift was reprinted in 2014. One year later Trudeau swept into power, completely invalidating the book’s thesis.

Ibbitson is a parenthetical figure, a Globe and Mail journalist, whose relevance resides in the useful neologism he provided and in his status as a representative and influential Laurentian himself, as essay and book make clear. Ibbitson acknowledged that the Western provinces had been treated as “semi-colonial possessions” rather than equal members in Confederation. But he thought all had changed. “The West is in,” Ibbitson declared. “In fact, it is in charge.” This was his assessment of the effect of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government – which has proven utterly ephemeral. Harper may have been “Canada’s First Post-Laurentian Prime Minister”, as claimed in this journal, but it was not to last. Under Trudeau, the West is as out as it’s ever been. And the country as a political entity is less Canadian than it’s ever been. The Laurentian cabal lords over us still, dominant and unaccommodating.

“The West is in,” declared Toronto Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson in The Big Shift; his thesis proved to be premature, exaggerated and even invalid after Trudeau came to power, re-establishing the Laurentian approach to national governance.

Writing in the National Post, John Weissenberger has no doubt of the fact. “The Laurentian Elite were Upper Canadian Anglo-Protestants and Québécois Patricians, and their descendants still dominate the upper strata of politics, the bureaucracy, Crown corporations and agencies, academia and media,” the Montreal-born Alberta geologist wrote. The current generation of Laurentians, he notes, “Largely reflect the universal, broadly-leftist monoculture.” They are with us like a dirty shirt. Their “torpor and complacency,” however, “coupled with an increasingly arrogant detachment from many ordinary Canadians, particularly those outside central Canada, caused repeated social and political rifts.” The truckers’ protest was among the most physical of these – and could prove the most momentous.

Disdainful of the hardworking, energetic and still somewhat rural-based West, Trudeau, a gilt-edged Laurentian aristocrat, represents precisely what the problem is with this country. We might say that he and his fellow aristocrats are the “first cause” of the truckers’ revolt, which he has done everything in his power to malign and punish. Absent Trudeau and his nasty, ill-advised and unnecessary Covid-19 policies, the trucks would never have rolled.

Louis Riel Would Have Understood the Truckers

To properly understand the truckers’ opposition to the Trudeau Liberals’ vaccine mandate, we need to go back to Canada’s beginnings. The British North America Act of 1867 (later renamed the Constitution Act, 1867) recognized a self-governing Dominion comprising a rump Quebec and Ontario and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What was known as Rupert’s Land covered the vast extent of the interior landmass, including what later became Manitoba (1870) and Saskatchewan (1905). Alberta (1905) was carved out from both Rupert’s Land and the adjacent North-Western Territory.

The administrative core of the new country, however, was found in the centre-east with its capital in the backwater town of Ottawa. As we have seen, what came to be known as the Laurentian Compact exercised political and economic control of the fledgling nation and, as noted, remains the administrative, political and financial power-centre to this day.

In 1867, the newly created, self-governing Dominion of Canada included several provinces, soon followed by the purchase of Rupert’s Land (left map), parts of which later became the second-class provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta; political and economic control over the young nation rested in the hands of the Laurentian Compact, the elite based in the St. Lawrence River watershed (right map). (Source of maps: (left) Golbez, licensed under CC BY 2.5; (right) Kmusser, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5)

To understand in yet greater detail the gravamen of the truckers’ protest, one must return specifically to the period between 1869 and 1885. These years saw the Red River Rebellion and the subsequent North-West Rebellion, studied in meticulous, close-packed detail in George Stanley’s magisterial The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions and Tom Flanagan’s illuminating essay in The Dorchester Review.

When the newly installed Canadian federal government took formal control of Rupert’s Land in 1870, it did not consult with the indigenous Métis, aka the Bois-Brûlé population (children of the union between First Nations women and French and English trappers). Local resentment at being passed over led eventually, under the leadership of Louis Riel, to a Métis uprising, resulting in the formation of a provisional government for purposes of negotiation with Ottawa regarding terms of entry into the Canadian Confederation.

This initiative did not work out well and the Métis did not flourish under the new dispensation. In the course of time a large proportion of Métis lost title to their land, which ultimately contributed to the bloody North-West Resistance of 1885, culminating in the total victory of the federal government, a string of executions including that of Riel, and the further deterioration of relations between the Prairie West and central Canada, which continues to this day. There were, of course, atrocities on both sides, but there is no doubt that the Métis got the short end of the stick.

Canada’s newly established federal government failed to consult with the Métis population of Rupert’s Land, which triggered an uprising under Louis Riel (left) and eventually the bloody North-West Resistance, which was crushed by federal troops. Shown at right, the Battle of Batoche during the North-West Rebellion. (Source of left photo: Manitoba Historical Society Archives)

In his 1954 book Social Credit and Federal Power in Canada, political scientist James Mallory described the Prairie additions as “provinces in the Roman sense.” (According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the origin of the term is obscure, “mistakenly derived from pro + vincere [vanquished] by Roman antiquarians. Its basic meaning is the sphere in which a magistrate is to function.” In his recent C2C essay on Alberta’s future, University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper went with the more martial version of the disputed etymology.) In our terms, the Prairie provinces were regions dominated by the ruling, administrative centre to whom they owed fealty and paid tribute. Parsing Mallory, Cooper explains: “Ottawa acted as a new Rome on the Rideau. The territories (and soon-to-be second-class provinces)…existed to strengthen and benefit Laurentian Canada by analogy with Roman Italy, and to enrich its leading citizens.”

Here we must refer to the record of the influential Sir Clifford Sifton in the years 1895-1905. As J.W. Dafoe writes in his biography, CLIFFORD SIFTON in Relation to HIS TIMES, Sifton was a major figure in early Canadian affairs, joining Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government in 1896. He became federal Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, responsible for immigration and settlement of the Prairies. Under his leadership, immigration to the Prairie West increased from 16,835 in 1896 to 141,465 in 1905. Against attacks by English-speaking Canadians who feared that immigrants from eastern and central Europe would be a threat to their culture and livelihood, Sifton famously defended the “stalwart peasants in sheep-skin coats” who were turning some of the most difficult areas of the West into productive farms. Sifton touted the phrase the “Last Best West” to market the Canadian Prairies to prospective immigrants.

But there was another side to Sifton which also needs to be conceded. According to the Alberta Prosperity Project, Alberta and the Prairie West have gotten a raw deal from the central establishment since their inception as part of the Dominion. The editors quote Sifton’s speech to Parliament during its 1904 session: “We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire, that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work, and in every legitimate way to our prosperity.” As former military engineer and warrant officer Tex Leugner commented in the Cochrane Eagle, “Note the phrase ‘to enrich our own people in the East’! How prophetic Sifton was in laying the groundwork for the theft that has gone on unabated since 1905.”

The Laurentian view, crystallized: Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, famously defended the “stalwart peasants in sheep-skin coats” who were used to settle the Prairies and whose trade “shall go to enrich our people to the East.” (Sources of photos: (left) Library and Archives Canada/PA-27943; (right) Library and Archives Canada/C-000681)

The question was also examined by Mabel F. Timlin in a paper titled Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1896-1910printed in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (Vol. XXVI, No. 4, November 1960, pp. 517-532). Timlin cites Sifton’s letter of April 15, 1901 to Laurier in which Sifton advocates the importance of “encouraging immigration for the development of natural resources and the increase in production of wealth from these resources.” The wealth so generated comes to rest mainly in the coffers and consortiums of the East. The intimation is disturbing. Sifton was a man of the West, the de facto founder of the province of Manitoba. At the same time, he was also a man of the East, working to enrich its power and economic nexus. A veritable Jekyll and Hyde, Sifton is a symbol of a divided Canada, a country that has not yet decided what it wants to be.

The Modern-Day Laurentian Economic Model

Commenting on the present imbroglio in which the country finds itself, Leugner takes issue with Laurentian profiteering and self-aggrandizement specifically in the form of Canada’s so-called “Equalization” program. The federal government describes it as a means “for addressing fiscal disparities among provinces”; equalization works by indirectly transferring revenues drawn from the taxpayers of more-productive and higher-income provinces to less prosperous provincial governments.

One can see the intrinsic problem for a country where some jurisdictions perennially lag and others consistently out-perform. Alberta’s average equalization contribution is substantially over-leveraged. According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, equalization has cost Alberta taxpayers $67 billion since its inception in 1957, making the cost of equalization per Albertan $20,200 since 1957; in 2021, equalization overall cost Alberta taxpayers $2.9 billion. The Fraser Institute pegs the 2017 net outflow at $3.1 billion. Estimates may vary but remain within the same ballpark.

Since the inception of Canada’s equalization program in 1957, Alberta has made a net contribution of $67 billion – which in turn represents only a small part of the province’s immense financial contribution to federal coffers and the governments and residents of other provinces.

Even more significantly, the Fraser Institute notes that the equalization drain represents “just a small part of the province’s outsized contribution to confederation in recent years.” It calculates that “the gap between Albertans’ contribution to federal revenues and federal expenditures plus transfers to the province, totalled $20.5 billion annually in 2017/18. And this measure excludes Albertans’ disproportionate cumulative contribution to the Canada Pension Plan, which on net totalled $2.9 billion in 2017.”

Meanwhile, as Alberta is being plundered, Justin Trudeau, like his father Pierre, is doing everything in his power to eviscerate Alberta’s energy industry, the source of its prosperity and of Canada’s solvency. Indeed, the recently completed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, shipping oil at last after a horrendous nearly 15-year gestation, is slated to contribute 0.25 percent to Canada’s GDP growth next year – more, indeed, than the entire province of B.C. Leugner concludes, despairingly: “It is my opinion that Canada, as it’s currently structured, is a broken nation.” This from a veteran, much-deployed officer in the Canadian military.

“The province that carries most of the weight, bears the most pain”: Alberta’s oil and natural gas industry and entire economy were devastated by the taxes and regulations of Pierre Trudeau’s (top) 1980 National Energy Program; today Alberta’s burden is amplified by the younger Trudeau’s onerous carbon tax. Shown at bottom, a pro-pipeline demonstration in Calgary, Alberta. (Source of bottom photo: The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh)

The Prairies are Canada’s food and energy breadbasket and have suffered under the rule of Eastern Canada’s Laurentian peerage, particularly with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s low-pricing, high-taxing National Energy Program (NEP) in 1980, which devastated Alberta’s oil industry and entire economy. Justin Trudeau is picking up where his father left off, slapping an onerous carbon tax on the nation that has already pulverized the national economy and has proved especially costly to Prairie agriculture and energy production. As the late Rex Murphy wrote in the National Post, Alberta is “the province that carries most of the weight, bears the most pain and has the least say in this mad enterprise.”

The tax, Murphy continued, will “injure the very farmers who have been stocking the supermarket shelves during COVID, put oil workers (at least those who still have jobs) out of work, and increase the cost of living for everyone…This new carbon tax will throw a spike in the heart of the oil and gas industry. Keep in mind that it is but the most recent in a long string of policies designed to hamstring the industry, block its exports and drive investment out of the province.”

The Enduring Meaning of the Truckers’ Protest

Section 92A [of the Constitution Act] confirms the constitutional foundation for provincial natural resource management and a significant role in natural resource trade and anchors Alberta’s energy resource economic strength. This is Peter Lougheed’s economic legacy for Alberta.

This is how we need to understand the truckers’ massive 2022 protest, nominally a form of domestic resistance against the vaccine mandates that crippled their health and their livelihoods, as it did the nation in large. But it is fundamentally an expression of the greater historical context of Eastern political, legislative and market domination of the Western provinciae and the determined response of a long misprized, undervalued and misrepresented sector of the nation, rising up against the metaphorical equivalent of the federal government’s 1885 land grab.

Resistance is continuing to mount. The province of Saskatchewan has refused to pay the federal government’s carbon levy and has just been granted an injunction to stop the Canada Revenue Agency from simply garnisheeing the (mounting) outstanding sum. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government introduced and quickly passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in response to proposed federal net-zero electricity grid regulations and other recurring intrusions on the province’s core jurisdictions. “We are left with no choice but to create a shield to protect Albertans from Ottawa’s dangerous and unconstitutional electricity regulations,” Smith said at the time. She has also proposed an Alberta Crown Corporation that would be wholly owned by the province and over which the federal government could exert no control, which would function as a market generator.

To defend against the federal government’s ongoing intrusions on Alberta’s constitutional jurisdiction, Danielle Smith’s (top) UCP government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act – a “shield to protect Albertans from Ottawa’s dangerous and unconstitutional electricity regulation.” Shown at bottom, supporters of the Sovereignty Act gather in Edmonton, Alberta, December 2022. (Sources of photos: (top) Alberta Newsroom, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom) Caleb Perreaux/CBC)

As to be expected, the Sovereignty Act has been denounced by all the usual Laurentian suspects and Liberal toadies: the CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and many others. No matter. The aforementioned Barry Cooper places Alberta’s Sovereignty Act in the context of the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens. And he is right. The germ of the issue goes back to the unequal founding of Canada as a Confederation and is now culminating in manifestations like the Freedom Convoy and its consequences, Saskatchewan’s defiance of Trudeau’s carbon tax and Alberta’s long-deferred Sovereignty Act.

The truckers’ Freedom Convoy was not just a desperate response to the Trudeau government’s ruinous vaccine mandate but, the author believes, a historically significant attempt to restore the political balance between Eastern and Western Canada. (Source of photo: Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Canadian Constitution establishes that the federal Parliament deals mainly with issues that concern the country as a whole, including inter-provincial trade, national defence, criminal law, money, patents, and the postal service, whereas the provinces have the authority to make laws about education, property, civil rights, the administration of justice, hospitals, municipalities, and other local or private matters. Lands and resources within or lying beneath provinces are also clearly-stated areas of provincial jurisdiction and ownership. Pointedly, “Crown” lands are almost always owned by the Crown in right of the province within which they fall.

The federal government has no business intruding on the rights of the provincial domain as guaranteed by the Constitution. But under Trudeau the Younger, that is virtually all it does. Ottawa has gone even further in moving to centralize political control in the Prime Minister’s Office rather than respecting provincial jurisdiction.

The truckers’ response to the federal usurpation of plenary authority under cover of a pandemic was in the last analysis an attempt to right the political, economic and administrative balance between Eastern and Western Canada. Laurentian hegemony had to be cut down to size, and though it appeared that the federal power had once again – as in the 1885 hecatomb of the Prairie rebels – won the day, routing the truckers, confiscating vehicles, freezing bank accounts, imprisoning its leaders and mobilizing the legacy media to blanket the nation with lies, the aftermath was an awakened and defiant Western Canada, an almost universally hated prime minister, a Liberal party on the ropes, and a gradual vindication of the Truckers’ bravery and suffering in an honourable and democratic cause.

Justice is now Being Served

Let not my people be held at ransom.

Let them thrive, let them be defended.

—Louis Riel, from Selected Poetry of Louis Riel

“The North-West Rebellion was far more important in its results than in itself,” wrote the aforementioned George Stanley in The Birth of Western Canada. The truckers’ descent upon Ottawa is one of those later results of the Red River Rebellion that Stanley had considered to be of enduring significance. The analogy suggested by the reliable trucker supply chain over the years and during the pandemic, namely, of the West feeding the East with comestibles, goods and energy, should have been obvious to any observant person. Justice is now being served. The protest inspired confidence in its purpose, exposed the federal government as an authoritarian leviathan, and led to the responses that we are witnessing in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

At this historic juncture, the Laurentian elite must agree to terms and make peace with the Prairie West if both are to become true partners in a renovated Confederation. At the moment, the most important city in Canada is not to be found in the Laurentian triangle of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Despite its current problems with an unpopular mayor and a compromised infrastructure, the most important city in Canada today is Calgary, not only the home of the world-famous Calgary Stampede, but also “the epicenter of the energy industry in Canada with head offices of every major company…located in the city,” as an upcoming global energy conference describes it.

The nation’s most important city, the author argues, is not Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal, but Calgary – home of the world-famous Calgary Stampede and “the epicenter of the energy industry in Canada with head offices of every major company.” (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top-left): micha_dauber, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0Gnosis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0Ron Cogswell from Arlington, Virginia, USA, licensed under CC BY 2.0; JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock)

The irony is exquisite. Should the respective powers and responsibilities of federal and provincial authority be clarified and genuinely ratified, should a fair distribution of obligations and prerogatives between Ottawa and the Western capitals be arrived at, the truckers may yet have saved the country from its downward spiral and helped to create the just and equable Canada that it should have been from the beginning. As the above-quoted Savoie writes in Democracy in Canada, “Canada was born to break the political deadlock between Canada West and Canada East.”

It was a long road from Prince Rupert to Ottawa, but a road, as it turns out, that had to be travelled.

David Solway’s latest prose book is Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West (New English Review Press, 2023)A new poetry chapbook, From the Sommelier’s Notebook, was released in July 2024 (Little Nightingale Press). Solway has produced two CDs of original songs: Blood Guitar and Other Tales (2014) and Partial to Cain (2019) on which he is accompanied by his pianist wife Janice Fiamengo. A third CD, The Dark, is in planning.

Before Post

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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C2C Journal

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part I

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From the C2C Journal

By Lynne Cohen
In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.
As the 13-month-long trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber lurched into its final days at the Ottawa Courthouse, Assistant Crown Attorney Siobhain Wetscher reached for her highest dudgeon and broadest hyperbole. In making her closing arguments, Wetscher declared this to be an “overwhelming case” backed by an abundance of “significant evidence.” Attempting to draw the focus onto the assembled facts, she swatted away claims it was a politically-motivated prosecution. “The defendants are not on trial for politics,” Wetscher stressed. “They crossed the line, objectively. The smell, the noise, the harassment were not lawful!” Given the reaching tone and considering the actual weight of the evidence, it often seemed as if Wetscher was trying to convince herself as much as Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey.

To back their case, Wetscher and fellow Assistant Crown Attorney Tim Radcliffe had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that was projected onto two screens in Courtroom 5 during their final arguments. Entitled “R. v. Christopher Barber & Tamara Lich: Closing Submissions of the Crown”, the 106-slide exhibit began by listing the various charges: committing mischief, obstructing a peace officer and blocking a highway as well as counselling others to commit mischief, obstruct, block a highway and disobey a court order (the last one against Barber only). It also offered a quick guide to dozens of previous mischief, obstruction and intimidation judgements considered relevant to the case.

An “overwhelming case”: According to the closing arguments of Assistant Crown Attorneys Siobhain Wetscher (top left) and Tim Radcliffe (top right) presented in the Ottawa Courthouse, the trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber was not about politics, but the fact the pair “crossed the line” during the protest. (Source of bottom photo: CTV News)

Beyond a useful summary of the charges and case law, the Crown’s slideshow was also meant as one last reminder of the “significant evidence” arrayed against the Freedom Convoy pair. It thus contained numerous exhibits already submitted during the 45-day trial, including maps of the protest area, snippets from TikTok videos, transcripts from press conferences, witness testimony and interrogations as well as court orders, texts, letters, handbills, emails, Facebook posts and so on. As such, it serves as a kind of multimedia scrapbook for the entire three-week-long protest in Ottawa during January and February 2022.

And as is usually the case with scrapbooks, there were also plenty of photographs, presumably selected for the same reason as all the other evidence – because they bolster the case against Lich and Barber. In particular, the pictures are meant to provide proof of their close partnership in leading an unlawful protest and convincing others to break the law. But there’s a problem with this plan: none of the photos show either doing anything other than participating in an entirely peaceful, apparently constitutional and often quite-joyous-looking protest.

Slide 61, for example, shows the duo in winter gear hugging each other with big grins on their faces. Slide 76 has a smiling Lich explaining on TikTok that the protest is “like Canada Day on steroids.” Slide 100 is a screenshot of Lich on the verge of being arrested telling her Facebook supporters that, “I pray and hope that you will make your choices from love…we can only win this with love.”

And then there’s slide 106. The presentation’s last slide pairs a quote from Wetscher and Radcliffe with yet another picture of Lich and Barber. The text reads, “The Crown respectfully requests that the court find Mr. Barber and Ms. Lich guilty of all counts as charged.” The photo shows them together once more – again smiling broadly. This time they’re standing with Mike Stack, another protester, in front of Barber’s truck “Big Red”. If the point of this photo is to prove once and for all that Lich and Barber were engaged in a dangerous, insurrectionist conspiracy, it fails miserably.

The Crown’s 106-slide closing presentation served as a multi-media scrapbook of the three-week-long Freedom Convoy protest, inadvertently highlighting the event’s joyousness and peacefulness. Of note, the final slide (bottom) shows a smiling Lich, Barber and fellow protester Mike Stack – while Barber’s dog Zippy enjoys the view from the driver’s seat of Barber’s truck “Big Red”.

And hilariously – as a close inspection reveals Barber’s dog Zippy sitting in Big Red’s driver’s seat, mouth agape in a wild doggy smile, looking down upon the trio as if to say, “Look at me. I’m driving the truck!” For a criminal case that threatens Lich and Barber with a decade in jail for allegedly imperilling the very foundation of public order across Canada, and has consumed more than a year of precious court time, Zippy’s photo-bomb doesn’t answer the question of guilt, it raises an entirely different one.

Is this really the best the Crown can do?

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Long-Haul Trucking

On January 23, 2022, the Freedom Convoy began rolling out from Canada’s West Coast towards Ottawa, while other smaller groups of vehicles streamed westward from Quebec and other points. Three months earlier, the Government of Canada had unexpectedly announced that cross-border truckers who had not received a course of Covid-19 vaccination would have to isolate for up to two weeks when crossing the U.S.-Canada border, overturning an earlier exemption for the trucking industry. Despite furious pushback, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to relent and the mandate came into effect on January 15.

In response, thousands of truckers and others in cars and pickup trucks from all over the country joined the procession to make their feelings known, while thousands more waved them on from freeway overpasses and small towns along the way. Lich and Barber were involved in this movement from the beginning – creating social media accounts, setting up fundraising efforts and building an internal support structure – although the convoy itself defied organization. Lich and Barber may have been instrumental, but they were not almighty.

Let those truckers roll, 10-4: In January 2022, thousands of vehicles from across the country converged on Ottawa to protest a dramatic change in the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine policy for cross-border trucking. (Sources of photos: (top) Andrei Filippov/Shutterstock; (bottom) GoToVan, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Lich was born in Saskatoon to a Métis family and adopted as an infant. She has lived a varied life on the Prairies, working mainly as an administrator in the energy services sector and raising three children. She currently lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta with her husband Dwayne, who farms. She’s proud of her native heritage and also boasts of being a singer in a garage rock band. Lich has been politically active for many years, typically drawn to a robust defence of Western Canada’s political interests and consistently opposing the current Trudeau government. In 2018 she joined the “Yellow Vest” movement, and has also been a member of the Alberta Wildrose Party and the federal Maverick Party.

But it was the federal Liberals’ draconian response to the Covid-19 pandemic that pushed her activist inclinations into overdrive. “What kind of country had Canada become?” Lich would later write about the impact of vaccine mandates. “We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.”

As for Barber, he hails from the small southwest Saskatchewan city of Swift Current. The 49-year-old married father of two children owns and operates a trucking firm, C.B. Trucking Limited, which specializes in long hauls of agricultural equipment. His popular TikTok account @bigred19755 provided him with a platform to complain – often impishly – about the impact of government regulation on the trucking business. As would be expected, the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on his business. Barber got the vaccine shots as required, but disagreed with how they were imposed.

By the time they got to Ottawa: Lich (left, with husband Dwayne) of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Barber (right, with Big Red) of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, found themselves leading the Freedom Convoy as a result of their shared opposition to federal Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

“I was at risk of losing all that hard work [building my company] to not being able to cross the border anymore,” he explained to True North News. As his frustration with Covid-19 rules grew, Barber leveraged his status on social media to become a leading voice for truckers’ outrage over vaccine policy, which in turn spurred him to help launch the Freedom Convoy. “I was angry, very angry,” Barber later explained. “The provincial mandates, the federal mandates…it seemed like it was an over-reach.” From 30,000 followers prior to the convoy, Barber’s TikTok account grew to 170,000 by the time the truckers rolled into Ottawa.

When Lich, Barber and the rest of the original convoy reached Ottawa in late January, numerous other groups and individuals unaligned with the initial organization had joined the protest for their own reasons, and with their own objectives, timelines and standards of behaviour. What most participants had in common was a deep antipathy towards the Trudeau government and a desire to make this known in the heart of the nation’s capital. Their right to do so peacefully was initially acknowledged by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). As they arrived, OPS officers met the truckers, showed them where to park and took steps to allow them to store provisions. For the first week or so, Lich and Barber worked closely with the cops to keep emergency routes open and relations cordial. This congenial situation eventually soured, however, as the protesters lingered.

Just over two weeks later, on February 14 the federal government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act based on the Liberal Cabinet’s assertion that the protest constituted a Canada-wide “public order emergency” that could not be dealt with under existing laws and which involved threats of “serious violence against persons or property.” This essentially criminalized the Freedom Convey and all its supporters. Riot police then moved to physically clear the protest area, and 196 protesters in the immediate area were arrested. Another 76 individuals were arrested elsewhere in Canada at around the same time for attending other protests, including blockades at three border crossings in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

Crushing the “insurrection”: Initially accommodated by the Ottawa Police Service, the Freedom Convoy protest was later deemed a national “public order emergency”. Shown at top left, police circulate throughout the protest on February 9; top right, police hand out notices to protesters on February 17; at bottom, police confront and arrest protesters on February 18. (Sources of photos: (top left) The Canadian Press Images/Lars Hagberg; (top right) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang; (bottom left and right) Michel Elzo/Shutterstock)

The federal Liberals also bullied Canada’s chartered banks into freezing the bank accounts of many people connected to the protest. Lich and Barber had their personal finances locked and both were later arrested. Lich’s single, initial charge was for “counselling to commit the offence of mischief”; Barber was charged with counselling mischief, as well as obstruction and ignoring a court order. While half-a-dozen other charges were later added to the pair’s alleged offences, mischief was the common thread that connected them to the vast majority of other protesters arrested during the crackdown.

This prevalence of mischief seems a rather surprising fact. Amidst what was supposedly a massive and violent breakdown in public order, mischief – or counselling others to be mischievous – turned out to be the most serious crime the police could detect. In Ottawa there were no assaults, no murders, no guns or bombs, no fraud or extortion, no rioting and looting, no treason. Nothing, in other words, that might have signalled that an actual (as opposed to imagined or media-manufactured) insurrection was underway or imminent.

There was, however, one criminal act that provably did occur in Ottawa during the protests. Two men attempted to set an apartment building’s entryway alight and then sealed the doors shut. This appalling and dangerous act was immediately attributed by some to the protesters. Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, for example, stated it “clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of the protesters occupying our city.” Police soon established, however, that the fire had no link to anyone connected to the Freedom Convoy.

Legal Mischief

While the term conjures up images of a misbehaving toddler, section 430 of the Criminal Code of Canada defines mischief very broadly as the willful destruction of property or interference with others’ lawful enjoyment of their own property. It should not be taken too lightly, cautions Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal lawyer. “Yes, mischief can be something very minor, for example drawing graffiti on a public space, or chalking a sidewalk,” Spratt says in an interview. “But mischief can also include very serious offences, for example, occupying and blockading the national capital and inflicting extreme harm on its residents, businesses, and communities.”

As an indictable offence, mischief carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Since lawyers for Lich and Barber readily admit that mischief occurred during the protest, Spratt says the only legal issue to be decided in court is whether the pair were at fault “either as a party, a participant, an encourager, an abettor or a leader of the convoy who bears some responsibility for it.” In other words, Lich and Barber could be found guilty even if they didn’t commit any mischief themselves. That would, however, require crafting a rather elaborate theory to explain a rather mundane crime.

Not every legal observer is convinced mischief best fulfills the government’s claim that it was facing an incipient violent insurrection, as is required by the Emergencies Act. According to University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso, most mischief charges in Canada are actually quite minor and usually punished without any jail time. Reliance on what he, unlike Spratt, views as a rather insignificant crime as the means to punish Freedom Convoy protesters seems like “a safe, bureaucratic choice for the police,” Velloso explained to The Canadian Press, adding it is “a less demanding choice in terms of police work.”

Much ado about mischief: While Ottawa criminal lawyer Michael Spratt (left) says mischief can include “very serious charges”, University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso (right) observes that most mischief charges in Canada are minor and punished without any jail time. (Sources of photos: (left) Michael Spratt; (right) Errol McGihon/Saltwire)

Plus, it seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police. “The seriousness of the mischief during the protest was produced by lack of policing,” he asserted. This echoes the February 17, 2023 findings of the Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Justice Paul Rouleau, which also concluded that “policing failures” – in particular, inviting the truckers into the downtown area without any long-term plan to remove them – “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.”

In deciding whether the mischief charges faced by Lich and Barber are a big deal or not, it helps to consider the fate of other Freedom Convoy protesters faced with the same charge, many of whom have been represented by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). Steven Vardy, for example, was arrested while driving in downtown Ottawa after the Emergencies Act had been imposed and charged with obstruction. The charge of mischief was added after police discovered Vardy had narrated a video about the protest. The Crown dropped the obstruction charge before trial, and after two days in court the judge determined the mischief charge was equally untenable, and it too was dismissed.

Christine DeCaire, another JCCF client, was arrested while standing alone on Nicholas Street in downtown Ottawa as police moved to enforce the Emergencies Act on February 18. She was acquitted at trial, a result recently confirmed after the Crown appealed. JCCF client Ben Spicer was charged with mischief, obstruction and weapons offences after police grabbed him off the street during the protest and found a pocket knife and bear spray in his backpack. Spicer was then secretly recorded in a police van. After a six-day trial, all charges were dropped because he’d been arrested unlawfully. Evan Blackman, yet another JCCF client, was charged with mischief and obstruction, and had three bank accounts frozen. Drone footage later showed Blackman holding back protesters in order to de-escalate the situation. And just before he was arrested, he could be seen singing “O Canada”. The judge dismissed all charges after a one-day trial because of evidentiary weakness; the Crown is appealing.

Feeling mischievous: Police arrested 196 protesters in Ottawa after the Emergencies Act’s invocation, charging many with mischief and obstruction. Most had their charges later dropped or were found not guilty at trial, with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms playing a key role in these successful defences. (Source of photoThe Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Not every mischief case has collapsed in calamitous fashion, however. Publicity-seeking protester Tyson “Freedom George” Billings, who was not represented by the JCCF and had no direct link to Lich or Barber, pleaded guilty to counselling others to commit mischief. The other charges against him were dropped and he was sentenced to time served, about four months. And Pat King, who also garnered ample attention during the protest, is still awaiting the verdict of his mischief trial, which lasted three weeks. King and Billings were notable for their confrontational and often uncooperative relationship with the police during the protest, in sharp contrast with Lich and, for the most part, Barber.

Another exception to the raft of failed cases is the fate of the so-called “Coutts Four”. Separately from the Ottawa protest, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Chris Lysak and Jerry Morin were among the most hard-line of hundreds of participants at a tense, weeks-long standoff at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. On February 15 the four were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers as well as other weapons and mischief offences, upon which the whole protest disintegrated. Meanwhile, up to 100 other protesters at the site were charged with provincial regulatory offences.

Mischief ignored: The “Coutts Four” – (left to right) Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin and Christopher Lysak – were found guilty of serious crimes arising from a tense blockade at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. While Olienick and Carbert were also found guilty of mischief, their six-month sentences for this crime are to be served concurrently with their other, longer sentences. (Source of montage: CBC)

This past February, Lysak pled guilty to possession of a weapon in an unauthorized place and Morin pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms – clearly serious offences, but a vast reduction from the potential life sentences they faced. Both were sentenced to time served. More recently, Olienick and Carbert each received sentences of six-and-a-half years for various weapons offences. As for their mischief charges, each received an additional six-month sentence to be served concurrently with the other, more serious convictions. Finally, an Alberta law firm recently announced that of nearly 50 clients facing provincial charges for participating in the Coutts border protest, all either had their cases dropped or resolved for a nominal fine of $1 each.

At this point, Lich and Barber appear to be the only remaining major participants from the entire national saga who are still available to punish.

“Prosecutorial Vendetta”

While outcomes have varied, a clear pattern emerges from a survey of mischief charges laid during the Emergencies Act. Most have been dismissed or returned with a not guilty verdict after only a few days in court. A few – such as Billings’ guilty plea – have resulted in a minor sentence befitting the minor character of the crime itself. For Olienick and Carbert, their guilty verdicts for mischief had no impact on their overall jail time; they faced much more serious charges, and their mischief was essentially ignored. And the mischief trial for Pat King, who is still awaiting his verdict, was completed in three weeks.

By comparison, the trial of Lich and Barber stretched into a 13-month epic, comprising 45 trial days. All for a collection of rather modest mischief and obstruction charges. Why would that be?

The answer, according to Ari Goldkind, a high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer, lies in the exact thing Wetscher tried so hard to wave away during her concluding statement: politics. “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,” Goldkind states emphatically in an interview. For the Trudeau government to justify its suspension of Canadians’ civil liberties through the Emergencies Act requires an identifiable villain or two. Lich and Barber fit that bill. The length and unprecedented vigour with which the Crown has pursued the pair – Lich especially – as well as the manner in which the trial has dragged on, argues Goldkind, suggest there’s a “prosecutorial vendetta” against them.

“Prosecutorial vendetta”: Referring to Lich and Barber, high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind says, “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial.” (Source of photo: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Lich herself arrived in Ottawa, the diminutive, then-49-year-old Métis grandmother quickly became the public “face” of the protest. At a February 3 press conference, for example, she was introduced as “the spark that lit this fire and the leader of this organization.” And while she claims in her book Hold the Line: My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy that such a description “wasn’t accurate,” she nonetheless admits she filled a necessary role. “I guess I found a talent I didn’t know I had before,” she writes, speculating that her time spent on stage with her band might have prepared her for all the attention. “But I mostly feel like it was guided by God,” she adds.

While the Freedom Convoy was essentially ungovernable, comprised as it was of many disparate groups and publicity-seeking, independent-minded individuals, Lich tried her best to put her own calm and reasonable stamp on the proceedings. Throughout the protest, Lich’s efforts were observably peaceful and without any apparent mal intent. One of her first acts was to set up an independent group of accountants to handle the flood of donations financing the protest to prevent any suggestion of financial impropriety. In her dealings with the police, she always tried to find common ground – a fact readily acknowledged by police witnesses during the trial. Sergeant Jordan Blonde of the OPS protest liaison team, for example, noted in his testimony that Lich was always “polite” in his dealings with her, and that the protest itself was comprised of “many different groups and factions… [and] unattached people” who were not “aligned with anybody.”

In her own interactions with the protesters, over whom she had no real control, Lich repeatedly stressed the protest’s peaceful nature and worked tirelessly to rid the movement of disreputable or hateful characters. She even cobbled together a deal with Ottawa mayor Watson to move some trucks out of the downtown area; ironically, that deal went into effect on the same day as the Emergencies Act was invoked. As her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon observed in a brief courthouse lobby interview, “She is a genuine, very pleasant person, and almost a throwback to the peace-and-love days. She was preaching all along that ‘we only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.’”

“A throwback to the peace-and-love days”: According to her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon (at left centre, in barrister’s robe), Lich was a source of calm and grace throughout the protest and “only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.” (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Perhaps it’s this “peace-and-love” attitude that has provoked such spite towards her. Whatever the reason, the official animosity has been painfully obvious. While the physically-imposing Barber was released on bail less than 48-hours after his arrest, Lich spent 18 days awaiting bail. At her first bail hearing, Ontario Justice Julie Bourgeois claimed Lich posed such a risk to the “physical, mental and financial health and well-being” of the people of Ottawa that she denied her application outright. Only after a bail review hearing several weeks later was Lich finally released pending trial. As Goldkind points out, many extremely violent and/or repeat offenders in Canada spend no time at all in jail following their arrest. This, as many critics observe, is the result of the Liberals’ 2019 bail reform package widely derided as a “catch-and-release” policy; it apparently doesn’t apply to Lich.

When she was finally set free, Lich returned to Alberta saddled with a long list of bail conditions, including that she neither publicly support the protest nor have any contact with other protest organizers unless a lawyer is present. “After weeks of fighting for Canadians’ right[s] and freedoms, I was losing so many of mine,” she laments in Hold the Line. It was because of these efforts, however, that in June 2022 it was announced that Lich had been awarded the annual George Jonas Freedom Award, sponsored by the JCCF. Naturally enough she wanted to go to Toronto to accept the honour in person. But before she could, the Crown came after her yet again.

At a court hearing necessitated by the award (since her bail conditions also banned her from setting foot in Ontario), Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee argued that simply by accepting the honour, Lich had violated the terms of her bail and should be locked up again. Such an absurdity was quickly brushed aside by the presiding judge, who ruled she could travel to Ontario to attend the celebration, provided she abided by the remainder of her bail restrictions. While there, however, Lich was photographed standing beside another convoy participant, Tom Marrazzo.

The fateful photo: When she went to Toronto to accept the 2022 George Jonas Freedom Award at a gala presentation, Lich was photographed beside fellow protester Tom Marrazzo (second from right) with lawyers standing just off-camera. This led to a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest and another 31 days in jail. (Source of photo: CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

As she recalls in her book, “Lawyers were standing just outside the frame” when the picture was snapped, in fulfilment of her bail conditions. No matter. When the lawyer-less picture began circulating on social media after she’d returned home, Karimjee issued a Canada-wide arrest warrant in her name. Two homicide detectives were then dispatched from Ottawa to pick Lich up in Medicine Hat; the two burly detectives slapped her in leg shackles for the trip to the Calgary airport. You can’t be too careful with grandmothers.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict. To this request, Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman asked Karimjee if he could name a single mischief case in Canada that had resulted in a 10-year sentence. When Karimjee demurred, Goodman set Lich free once more.

In his ruling, Goodman offered his own expert opinion on the fate awaiting Lich. She “is charged with mischief and obstructing police-related offences, not sedition or inciting a riot,” the judge pointed out. “It is highly unlikely that this 49-year-old accused, with no prior criminal record and questions regarding her direct participation in the overall protests…would face a potentially lengthy term of imprisonment.”

Even if she’s found guilty, Goodman concluded, she’ll probably be sentenced to no more than time already served. All told, that amounts to 49 nights in jail. Says Goldkind: “That’s 49 nights longer in jail than someone who is caught driving three-times over the legal [alcohol] limit would likely face.” Had Karimjee gotten his way, however, she’d still be in jail – a term of 28 months and counting.

In an effort to explain the Crown’s extreme hostility towards her, Lich reveals in her book that prosecutor Karimjee has donated over $17,000 to the federal Liberal Party since 2013 and that his generosity has merited an invitation to at least one “donor appreciation” event with Trudeau himself. Similarly, Bourgeois, the judge who initially denied Lich bail, was once a Liberal candidate in an Ottawa-area riding during the 2011 federal election. In her journey through the courts to that point – a case the Crown argues is not political in any way – it was Karimjee and Bourgeoise, both with longstanding and very public Liberal sympathies, who had been the gatekeepers of a legal system intent on holding her to account for leading a massive political protest against the Liberal government. As Lich writes, “I didn’t stand a chance.”

“I didn’t stand a chance”: According to Lich’s book Hold the Line, Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee (top right) made substantial donations to the Liberal Party of Canada beginning in 2013, while the judge in her initial bail hearing, Justice Julie Bourgeois (bottom right), ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2011 federal election. (Sources of photo: (top right) True North; (bottom right) juliebourgeoisgpr/YouTube)

Part II of “Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber” will appear on November 5.

Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practicing lawyer in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld.

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C2C Journal

The Indigenous “Land Back” Movement: A Land Mine for Canadians

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From the C2C Journal

By Michael Melanson
Amidst the litany of grievances levelled by Indigenous organizations it is easy to overlook the genuine progress made by some First Nations. Democratically elected native governments have negotiated additional rights, expanded their lands and gained control over natural resources and major projects, creating a sustainable economic base. But that apparently isn’t the course desired by a vocal subset of politically charged Indigenous North Americans. They’re unsatisfied with incremental progress or compromise. They are all grievance, all the time. And they want it all. Michael Melanson examines the emergence of the Indigenous “Land Back” concept, its evolution into militancy and potential violence, and its recent metastasis into some of the darkest crevices of the human psyche.

At a recent in-service for Manitoba teachers on the subject of Indigenous education, attendees were told by guest speaker Christopher Emdin that “resistance to colonialism is not terrorism” – the words splashed across a giant display screen. The American author and educational theorist was alluding to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against Israel, but he was also making a general statement about lands “occupied by settler colonialists” – i.e., ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians. Emdin had been hired because “settler colonialism” has become a source of pedagogical angst in the Winnipeg School Division. In trying to do its bit to effect Indigenous Reconciliation, the division – like others across Canada – has come to regard settler colonialism as the historic yet current oppressor. Emdin’s message conveyed an essential subtext: Indigenous people have a right to resist colonial occupation by any means necessary in order to get their land back.

Land Back is a political sentiment originating among Indigenous thinkers and activists in the United States that is now flourishing in Canada. Land Back is fundamentally revanchist: it seeks a return of lands considered to have been possessed by North American Indigenous peoples before contact with Europeans. As such, virtually all of North America can be regarded as former native territory if “possession” is defined loosely enough. It is difficult to characterize Land Back as a political movement because it lacks the associated cohesion and formal organization. Its core impulses are a combination of mysticism, grievance, aspiration and ideology. But its goals are unquestionably political – often fiercely so.

“Resistance to colonialism is not terrorism,” Christopher Emdin recently told a gathering of Winnipeg teachers; the American educational theorist was speaking in reference to Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 (right) but also as a general condemnation of “settler colonialism”. (Sources of photos: (left) The Brainwaves Video Anthology/YouTube; (right) AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Definitions of Land Back (also sometimes spelled Landback, LandBack or #LandBack) vary among professional and grassroots activists, opinion-leaders and other adherents. Jesse Wente, the journalist and current Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, says Land Back is “about the decision-making power. It’s about self-determination for our Peoples here that should include some access to the territories and resources in a more equitable fashion, and for us to have control over how that actually looks.”

Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe from Manitoba who is National Learning Community Coordinator of the 4Rs Youth Movement, states that the term “encompasses a complicated and intergenerational web of ideas/movements. When I hear Indigenous youth and land protectors chant ‘Land Back!’ at a rally, I know it can mean the literal restoration of land ownership. When grandmothers and knowledge keepers say it, I tend to think it means more the stewardship and protection of mother earth. When Indigenous political leaders say it, it often means comprehensive land claims and self-governing agreements.”

No single definition: Canadian arts journalist Jesse Wente (bottom left) describes Land Back as being “about the decision-making power”, while for Ronald Gamblin (bottom right) from 4Rs Youth Movement, the meaning depends on the person using it. Still others say it includes having the Sioux tribe gain control over the iconic U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (top). (Sources of photos: (top) Dean Franklin, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (bottom left) Royal Ontario Museum/YouTube; (bottom right) 4Rs Youth Movement)

From its general beginnings around 2010 or even earlier, Land Back’s first explicit expression came in 2018, according to Wikipedia, when Arnell Tailfeathers, a member of the Blood Tribe in Alberta, used it in the protests demanding the reversion to Sioux tribal control of the world-famous U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Versions of Land Back now are also found in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico.

Though it is hard to pin down precisely – as the varying descriptions above make clear – generally speaking Land Back is a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism. Proponents often disavow the legitimacy of Canada and the United States and frequently express hostility to their citizenry, whom they label “settler colonialists”. As in virtually all expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, an autonomous sovereign territory is sought by some Land Back proponents.

This article on the website of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (not to be confused with the High River, Alberta newspaper of the same name) attempts to instruct “white” readers in the Land Back movement’s virtues – and is therefore instructive in another way. It defines “land ownership” as merely a tactic “that keeps wealth and power in white families” (Hispanic and blacks apparently being uninterested in owning land), equates police with “violence”, lays essentially all of North America’s current ills at the feet of Europeans, suggests “Western colonizers” are “evil”, and talks about “so-called” civilization.

While the sentiments of Land Back are most commonly expressed at the populist levels of social media and public events, the initial success and popularity of early Land Back activists prompted composition of a formal manifesto in 2019: Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. It is written in the spirit of the 1970 Citizens Plus “Red Paper” by Harold Cardinal of the Indian Association of Alberta, which had been issued to angrily counter the Pierre Trudeau government’s preceding White Paper (formally, the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969).

The new Red Paper makes it clear that Land Back aims to rationalize aboriginal sovereignty and, as it states on page 48, assert “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction”. The 65-page document proposes a radical departure from liberal-democratic norms. It seeks to override the non-Indigenous nation-state and privilege a minority on the basis of ethnic/racial origin. The authors appear well-aware of what they are doing. They seek to justify a cultural exception to our ostensibly universalist liberal-democratic creed by using the assimilationist caricature of the 1969 White Paper as their theoretical foil.

Despite being widely if not universally portrayed as such – including by the authors of both Red Papers – the 1969 White Paper was not in my opinion concerned about cultural assimilation, but actually sought a third alternative to Canada’s historically fluctuating and often contradictory Indian policies of segregation and assimilation. Unfortunately, the White Paper only vaguely outlined this third alternative, as in the following passage from page 13: “For many years Canadians believed the Indian people had but two choices: they could live [in effective segregation] in a reserve community, or they could be assimilated and lose their Indian identity. Today Canada has more to offer. There is a third choice – a full role in Canadian society and in the economy while retaining, strengthening and developing an Indian identity which preserves the good things of the past and helps Indian people to prosper and thrive.”

A 2019 official manifesto of Land Back activists (top left) advocates for “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction” and a radical departure from Western liberal-democratic norms; their argument is based on a common critique of the Pierre Trudeau government’s 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, aka the White Paper (top right).

Although the White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from “the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,” it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term “sovereignty-association”. As the paper states: “Frustration is as great a handicap as a sense of grievance. True co-operation and participation can only come when the Indian people are controlling the land which makes up the reserves.”

The failure of the White Paper as a new policy direction resulted in a continuation of the frustration and grievance of the failed reserve system and, half a century later, Land Back activists like the Red Paper authors are trying to redeem the added years of misery. “Our times, too, are revolutionary,” the document states on page 6. “While tragically little has changed since 1968-1970, there are also emerging debates to reflect on and work through together. We continue to grapple with federal and provincial bureaucrats and/or industry on rights, title, and jurisdiction, but we are increasingly turning inward and are having productive conversations about what reclaiming land and water might look like, for all of us.”

“Citizens plus”: The 1970 “Red Paper” challenged the principles of universalism and racial equality, demanding special rights and thereby giving rise to the notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism”. Shown, Harold Cardinal (standing), 25-year-old leader of the Indian Association of Alberta, addresses Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his cabinet during a Parliament Hill meeting, June 4, 1970. (Source of photo: CP PHOTO)

This is a disingenuous remark on the post-White Paper stasis, because that state of affairs was itself largely promulgated by the aboriginal nationalists of the day (and their white academic supporters), who fiercely denounced and resisted any civil reforms that might have resulted in Indians becoming like other citizens of Canada. This stance would have profound consequences.

The 1970s and 80s gave rise to the idea of Canada’s Indians becoming “citizens plus” – as the original Red Paper’s formal title suggested – meaning they would have the same rights as other citizens but also held additional rights by virtue of being aboriginal people. This is also when a notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism” arose and began to challenge the principle of universalism – the liberal-democratic ideal that every citizen should be equal and none should be discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity, and which had otherwise come to inform social and government policy in Canada. The great Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate crystallized and amplified these elements, as well as birthing the Canadian version of the “decolonization” movement, as chronicled in this C2C article.

Forty-six years after Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper, his son was articulating just how far the idea of Indigenous exceptionalism had progressed in Canadian political discourse. During the 2015 federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau said that his government would “renew the nation-to-nation relationship with aboriginal people.” Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper neglected to press Trudeau on just what he meant by that promise, unfortunately so, because it is a highly dubious statement. What nation-to-nation relationship, never mind what happened to it that necessitated renewal?

Land Back can thus be seen as an accelerant to that fuzzy notion of renewing intra-national relationships (given there are at least 630 First Nations, there are potentially hundreds of nation-to-nation relationships in need of renewal), something that would guarantee years if not decades of grinding political negotiations, with all the frustration, disappointment and anger that would surely entail, leading to still more strife. The new Red Paper’s authors suggest what this might mean when they hint at the inherent militancy of Land Back on page 56: “[Another], and perhaps more direct, type of assertion revolves around physical reclamation or occupation of lands and waters.” If negotiations fail, in other words, we have other tactics at the ready.

Gamblin is explicit about this: “When you look at it, as Indigenous peoples and nations, we come from the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver, it’s what makes us Indigenous,” he writes on the 4Rs Youth Movement website. “Considering this, non-Indigenous folks need to understand that land back is about much more than land. You need to understand that when you hear youth scream ‘LAND BACK’, when you see land protectors stand off against the RCMP, when elders make prayers for the land, and when political figures sit in land negotiations, Land back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.”

The implications of “Indigenous exceptionalism”: Shown at top, graphic art recently posted to social media (at left) and spraypainted on a walkway (location unknown, at right) carrying violence-inciting messages; at bottom left, protesters unload a truck full of tires as they fortify a rail blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, Belleville, Ontario, February 2020; bottom right, Ontario Provincial Police arrest a protester at the same blockade. (Sources of photos: (top right) dav, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom left) The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg; (bottom right) The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

The existential association of being with land has been common if not ubiquitous among Indigenous peoples worldwide throughout history. It has been widely romanticized and is typically regarded as essentially harmless, or at least understandable. But when viewed unsentimentally, it is clear that it is ethno-centric and exclusionary if not explicitly racist. In perhaps its worst expression, the Nazis harnessed this atavistic impulse in their racist doctrine of Blut und Boden (which means “blood and soil”): since they are from the land, they are of the land and, as such, have more right to the land than someone who came to this land from elsewhere.

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large (and ever-growing) exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

Turning again to Gamblin, who provides a routine example of this mindset. “The architects of Canadian colonial policy,” he writes, “knew that if they wanted access to the lands in order to generate wealth and power, that they would need to separate us from this relationship. So, they used tactics such as forced relocation away from our homes and onto reserves (Canada’s apartheid system), introduction of patriarchal governance (Indian Act Chiefs), starvation of traditional resources (such as buffalo massacres), breaking family units and knowledge transfer through Indian Residential Schools, targeting women and children with violent policies, limiting our access to on the land cultural practices, and even making it illegal for us to fight in the Canadian legal framework for stolen land. These were systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother.”

Among the Canadian “colonial” government’s “systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother”, Gamblin names “targeting women and children with violent policies” and “buffalo massacres”, yet verifiable historical facts contradict his accusations. Shown at top, Indigenous children receiving medical examination; at bottom, a pile of bison skulls in the United States, 1892. (Source of bottom photo: Burton Historical Collection/Detroit Public Library)

Space does not permit a thorough parsing of Gamblin’s litany of grievances, but none of what he writes should be taken at face value. Although superficially factual at first glance, each phrase is loaded with emotionally charged adjectives and adverbs, exaggerations or falsehoods. The intent appears to be to convince by sleight-of-hand and emotion rather than historical accuracy.

Two quick examples by way of illustration. First, to Gamblin’s accusation of “targeting women and children with violent policies”. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, saw to it that every native Canadian was vaccinated against smallpox – in some cases, receiving inoculation even before the local white population. Second, “buffalo massacres” as a “systematic tactic” of “Canadian colonial policy”. It is established that well over 90 percent of the eradication of North America’s up to 50 million bison occurred in the United States. Of the rest, much of this was done by Indian and Métis buffalo hunters and, of that portion, nearly all of it took place before the newly formed Dominion of Canada gained legal control over the Prairies in 1870. The Government of Canada inherited a tragedy; it did not bring it about.

The new Red Paper’s academic tone is an exception to standard aboriginal activist discourse, but it too resorts to emotional hooks. “The stakes of these struggles are immense,” the authors state on page 64. “Of course, while Indigenous land and life are the focus here, the life of our species and of the planet are at risk from the type of economic philosophy and practices of (sic) perpetuated by colonialism and settler colonialism…So the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis…Canada – and states generally must listen.”

Having used decolonization ideology as a springboard to investing Indigenous-led solutions with the capacity to save the world, the Red Paper portrays the nation-state as posing a barrier to such an Indigenous-led global salvation. It portrays the UN as “an organization of states that first and foremost defends the territorial integrity of sovereign states,” which “means that states are the primary vehicle to address climate change and loss of biodiversity.” And so, the paper laments on page 65, “Even while the UN recognizes the harms states perpetuate against Indigenous people (including denying consent), they cannot imagine non-state Indigenous-led solutions that may threaten the state system.”

A global saviour in our midst: The Red Paper lays the blame for the world’s climate and biodiversity crises on settler-colonialism and calls for expanding the Land Back movement’s scope to one that offers “non-state Indigenous-led solutions” for the whole world. (Source of photo: Backbone Campaign, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The Red Paper authors appear to be suggesting that Indigenous organizations (to be determined) be given supra-jurisdictional authority. As grandiose and unrealistic as it sounds, it seems that they think aboriginal people should rule the world because they know what is best for the world and they know that because they are of the world in a way that non-Indigenous people are not; Mother Earth has given them her blessings as a birthright.

The continuing and in some ways worsening Indigenous/non-Indigenous dichotomy is a bane of humanity; it is antithetical to humanism because it presumes to determine who belongs here the most and who the least. If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. Some of the more sophisticated Indigenous exceptionalists are now staking their global campaign for jurisdiction on an issue of convenience: the fears of an existential peril – climate apocalypse – underpinned by the belief that they are somehow imbued with knowledge, skills and a force of origin that ordinary mortals do not possess. It is of course preposterous, and surely tempting to laugh off such presumption. But it needs to be taken seriously, for it is ultimately a mythos of race that justifies dominance of a sort that, in my view, has genuine and deeply disturbing parallels to Nazi “blood and soil” mysticism.

A new iteration of “Blood and Soil”? Land Back’s fundamental ethno-centrism mushrooms into overt racism among some of its extremist adherents, reminding the author of Nazism’s Blut und Boden doctrine, which held that only the racially pure local Volk had rights to the land. Shown at left, logo of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture; at right, farmers in Innsbruck, Austria wave swastika flags to salute German soldiers, March 1938. (Source of right photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0923-505, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 de)

Transposed to dullards and maladapts, the sentiments of Land Back become a surly revanchism that does not balk at the potential for barbarism. A disturbing number of Indigenous activists have, for example, come out in support of Hamas, grotesquely refashioning the October 7 atrocity as an act of decolonization. The Idle No More movement hosted a webinar barely a month after the massacre called “From Turtle Island To Palestine”, and a month after that Red Nation in the U.S. staged a teach-in on the same subject. “Palestine is actually doing a Land Back,” declared Sioux activist and academic Nick Estes, who spoke at both events. “They’re actually doing what we think we want to do but we haven’t gone there yet. Palestine is just doing it now…and for me, that was beautiful. I just want our resistance to be so strong, our fire as a people so strong that we just take back what is ours.”

Thankfully, there are courageous and notable Indigenous voices calling out such twisted opportunism. Noting that in Israel, it is Jews who are the Indigenous people, Chris Sankey, a businessman and former elected councillor of the Lax Kw Alaams Band near Prince Rupert, B.C., roundly condemned both the Hamas massacre and the attempt to distort its meaning to serve Canadian Indigenous activists’ decolonization agenda. “What has troubled me the most has been the frequency with which my peoples’ struggle for reconciliation has been invoked to justify the bloodshed, often by so-called ‘experts’ in the academy,” Sankey wrote in the National Post. “This is an absurd and, frankly, offensive comparison, as Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.”

Like Land Back, “decolonization” is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. It can never be said often enough: “decolonization” is a foreign idea, developed in the context of wars of independence in Africa by trained Marxists who advocated organized violence from the start. It is itself hateful and racist.

Speaking in support of the Hamas atrocities, Sioux activist Nick Estes (top right) praised the Palestinian attackers for “doing a Land Back” and called for the same behaviour among his own people; Chris Sankey (bottom right), a member of the Tsimshian community of Lax Kw’ Alaams in northwest B.C., replies that “Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.” Shown at bottom left, members of Samidoun (subsequently designated a terrorist organization) burn a Canadian flag on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, October 7, 2024. (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top left): Appalachians Against Pipelines/Facebook; @nickwestes/X; Conservative Paty of British ColumbiaJarryd Jaeger)

At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can “write code”. Some of those defining those terms are brooding nationalists informed by a colossal ledger of grievances against “settler colonialism” who are self-propelled with an existential sense of moral and mortal imperative and have come to regard themselves as a higher order of the human species. This is real: the Indigenous campaign to force the changing of the name of Powell River, B.C., has featured one aboriginal leader repeatedly referring to white Canadians as “subhuman”.

We should take caution. Between the pity, reverence and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and ways, there is a blind spot in which a ruthless racialist ideology can continue to grow.

Michael Melanson is a writer and tradesperson living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette.

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