From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Ray McGinnis

During the trial numbers of RCMP officers conceded that the Coutts Three were helpful in their interactions with the law. As well, there didn’t seem to be any truth to the suggestion that Van Huigenbos, Van Herk and Janzen were leaders of the protest.

Twelve jurors have found the Coutts Three guilty of mischief over $5,000 at a courthouse in Lethbridge, Alberta. Marco Van Huigenbois, Alex Van Herk and George Janzen will appear again in court on July 22 for sentencing.

Van Huigenbois, Van Herk and Janzen were each protesting at the Coutts Blockade in 2022. A blockade of Alberta Highway 4 began on January 29, 2022, blocking traffic, on and off, on Alberta Highway 4 near the Coutts-Sweetgrass Canada-USA border crossing. The protests were in support of the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.

Protests began due to the vaccine mandates for truckers entering Canada, and lockdowns that bankrupted 120,000 small businesses. Government edicts were purportedly for “public health” to stop the spread of the C-19 virus. Yet the CDC’s Dr. Rachel Wallensky admitted on CNN in August 2021 the vaccine did not prevent infection or stop transmission.

By February 2022, a US court forced Pfizer to release its “Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports” revealing the company knew by the end of February, 2021, that 1,223 people  had a “case outcome” of “fatal” as a result of taking the companies’ vaccine.

On the day of February 14, 2022, the three men spoke to Coutts protesters after a cache of weapons had been displayed by the RCMP. These were in connection with the arrest of the Coutts Four. Van Huigenbos and others persuaded the protesters to leave Coutts, which they did by February 15, 2022.

During the trial numbers of RCMP officers conceded that the Coutts Three were helpful in their interactions with the law. As well, there didn’t seem to be any truth to the suggestion that Van Huigenbos, Van Herk and Janzen were leaders of the protest.

RCMP officer Greg Tulloch testified that there were a number of “factions” within the larger protest group. These factions had strong disagreements about how to proceed with the protest. The Crown contended the Coutts Three were the leaders of the protest.

During his testimony, Tulloch recalled how Van Huigenbos and Janzen assisted him in getting past the “vehicle blockade to enter Coutts at a time during the protest when access to Coutts from the north via the AB-4 highway was blocked.” Tulloch also testified that Janzen and Van Huigenbos helped with handling RCMP negotiations with the protesters. Tulloch gave credit to these two “being able to help move vehicles at times to open lanes on the AB-4 highway to facilitate the flow of traffic in both directions.”

During cross examination by George Janzen’s lawyer, Alan Honner, Tulloch stated that he noticed two of the defendants assisting RCMP with reopening the highway in both directions. Honner said in summary, “[Marco Van Huigenbos and George Janzen] didn’t close the road, they opened it.”

Mark Wielgosz, an RCMP officer for over twenty years, worked as a liaison between law enforcement and protesters at the Coutts blockade. Taking the stand, he concurred that there was sharp disagreement among the Coutts protesters and the path forward with their demonstration. Rebel News video clips “submitted by both the Crown and defence teams captured these disagreements as demonstrators congregated in the Smuggler’s Saloon, a location where many of the protesters met to discuss and debate their demonstration.” Wielgosz made several attempts to name the leaders of the protest in his role as a RCMP liaison with the protesters, but was unsuccessful.”

However, the Crown maintained that the protest unlawfully obstructed people’s access to property on Highway 4.

Canada’s Criminal Code defines mischief as follows in Section 430:

Every one commits mischief who willfully

(a)  destroys or damages property;

(b)  renders property dangerous, useless, inoperative or ineffective;

(c)   obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property; or

(d)  obstructs, interrupts or interferes with any person in the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property.

Robert Kraychik reported that “RCMP Superintendent Gordon Corbett…cried (no comment on the sincerity of this emoting) while testifying about a female RCMP officer that was startled by the movement of a tractor with a large blade during the Coutts blockade/protest.” This was the climax of the trial. A tractor moving some distance away from an officer in rural Alberta, with blades. The shock of it all.

No evidence was presented in the trial that Van Huigenbos, Van Herk and Janzen destroyed or damaged property. Officers testified they couldn’t identify who the protest leaders were. They testified the defendants assisted with opening traffic lanes, and winding down the protest.

By volunteering to liaise with the RCMP, the Crown depicted the Coutts Three as the protest leaders. Who will choose to volunteer at any future peaceful, non-violent, protest to act as a liaison with the policing authorities? Knowing of the verdict handed down on April 16, 2024, in Lethbridge?

Ray McGinnis is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His forthcoming book is Unjustified: The Emergencies Act and the Inquiry that Got It Wrong.

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Bjorn Lomborg, author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus, continues to call attention to the extreme measures being demanded by climate change activists and politicians.

A climate expert has taken aim against what he calls “weather porn” – images and stories meant to convey a false impression that the world is on the brink of cataclysmic climate disaster – in order to force unnecessary policy changes by governments across the globe that will destroy prosperity and kill, not save, human lives.

In a series of recent opinion pieces and social media posts, Bjorn Lomborg, author, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, continues to call attention to the extreme measures being demanded by climate change activists and politicians who seek to inflict policies that are far more harmful than helpful.

“Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable. We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires,” wrote Lomborg in his recent newsletter. “But this impression is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data show climate-related events like floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people.”

“Quite the contrary. Over the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98% fewer people than a century ago,” said Lomborg. “If we want to achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation, and resilience. But when we are inundated with ‘weather porn’ and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.”

‘Six billion deaths in less than a year’

In an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Lomborg described what would happen if climate alarmists were to suddenly get their way:

The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food.

Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year.

Global elites have made it clear that they have judged the world to be vastly overpopulated, and have set for themselves a goal of reducing the world’s total population to just 500 million people. An “abrupt end to fossil fuel use” would come very close to achieving their utopian anti-human goal.

“Why is the environmental movement stewarded over by murderous, human-hating wackos who desire to see billions of people die?” asked James Corbett of the Corbett Report last month.

Not mincing words, Corbett continued: “Because the conservation movement (and all of the mainstream environmental organizations that grew out of that movement) was pioneered by murderous, human-hating eugenicists and funded by the eugenicist royals who wanted to keep their beautiful natural vistas clear of the riff-raff scurrying around beneath them.”

“Why do nation after nation appear to be in a race to the bottom, implementing policies that will actively hinder the productivity of their own populations and making it more and more difficult for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to eke out a subsistence living on the corporate-governmental fascist plantation that we call the developed world?” wondered Corbett.

“And why is it now increasingly in vogue for governments to offer “medically assisted dying” as their “solution” to the strain and stress of this deliberately degraded world? Because those same governments are stewarded over by elitist eugenicists who hate you and want you dead.”

‘Follow the science’ obscures truth, allows for the promotion of dangerous policies

Lomborg has said that the constant refrain of “follow the science” allows politicians to “obscure and avoid responsibility for lopsided climate-policy trade-offs.”

“More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office,” wrote Lomborg in his WSJ piece.

“It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction,” said the climate expert. “Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of ‘following the science.’”

Draconian net-zero climate policies are, according to Lomborg, prohibitively costly.

Recent peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost “will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100.”

“Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address,” yet this is precisely what the Biden administration is hoping to achieve by 2050.

Outgoing U.S. climate chief John Kerry, one of the chief purveyors of “weather porn,” suggested recently that if climate change is not quickly addressed, we face planetary destruction “beyond comprehension.”

UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell issued a similarly ominous if not shrill warning on X this week: “We have two years to save the world,” and therefore, “starting now, we need a quantum leap in climate finance [and] Bold new national climate plans by all nations.”

Lomborg fired back on X, dismissing the UN climate honcho’s hyperbolic claims.

“UN employees have been telling the same stale story for more than half a century: Now, that is right now, we have just a few years to save the world.”

UN employees have been telling the same stale story for more than half a century:

Now, that is right now, we have just a few years to save the worldhttps://t.co/Oz3yOGZUg8

Be a bit more serious, please? pic.twitter.com/hC6Sgu3hWt

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) April 11, 2024

“Some of the most popular climate policies will have costs far greater than climate change itself. When politicians try to shut down discussion with claims that they’re ‘following the science,’” concluded  Lomborg in the pages of the WSJ.

“Don’t let them,” he urged.