COVID-19
The Trials of Liberty: What the Truckers Taught Canada About Power and Protest
Half the country still believes the convoy was a menace; the other half thinks it was a mirror that showed how fragile our freedoms had become.
This Thanksgiving I am grateful for many things. The truckers who stood up to injustice are among them.
When the first rigs rolled toward Ottawa in January 2022, the air was sharp, but not as sharp as the mood of the men and women behind the wheels. They were not radicals. Seeing a CBC a campaign of disinformation about them begin as soon as their trek started, even when Ottawa political operatives hadn’t yet heard, I started following several of them on their social media.
They were truckers, small business owners, independent contractors, and working Canadians who had spent two years hauling the essentials that kept a paralyzed nation alive. They were the same people politicians, including Prime Minister Trudeau, had called “heroes” in 2020. By 2022, they had become “threats.”
The Freedom Convoy was born from exhaustion with naked hypocrisy. The federal government that praised them for risking exposure on the road now barred the unvaccinated from crossing borders or even earning a living. Many in provincial governments cheered Ottawa on. The same officials who flew to foreign conferences maskless or sat in private terraces to dine, let’s recall, still forced toddlers to wear masks in daycare. Public servants worked from home while police fined citizens for walking in parks.
These contradictions were not trivial; they were models of tyrannical rule. They told ordinary people that rules were for the ruled, not for rulers.
By late 2021, Canada’s pandemic response had hardened into a hysterical moral regime. Compliance became a measure of virtue, not prudence. Citizens who questioned the mandates were mocked as conspiracy theorists. Those who questioned vaccine efficacy were treated as fools; those who refused vaccination were treated as contagious heretics. Even science was no longer scientific. When data showed that vaccines did not prevent transmission, officials changed definitions instead of policies. The regime confused authority with truth. One former provincial premier just this week was still hailing the miracle of “life-saving” COVID vaccines.
For truckers, the breaking point came with the federal vaccine mandate for cross-border transport. Many had already complied with provincial rules and workplace testing. Others had recovered from COVID and had natural immunity that the government refused to recognize. To them, the new rule was not about safety; it was about humiliation. It said, “Obey, or you are unfit to work.”
So they drove.
Donna Laframboise, one of the rare journalists who works for citizens instead of sponsors, described the convoy in her book Thank You, Truckers! with gratitude and awe. She saw not a mob but a moral statement. She showcased for us Canadians who refused to live by lies. Their horns announced what polite society whispered: the emergency had become a creepy habit, and the habit had become a tool of control.
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When the convoy reached Ottawa, it was messy, loud, and human. There was singing, prayer, laughter, dancing and some foolishness, but also remarkable discipline. For three weeks, amid frigid temperatures and rising tension, there were no riots, no arsons, no looting. In a country that once prized civility, that should have earned respect.
Instead, it attracted the media’s and government’s contempt.
The Trudeau government, rattled by its own public failures, sprung to portray the protest as a national security threat. Ministers invoked language fit for wartime. The Prime Minister, who had initially fled the city claiming to have tested positive, returned to declare that Canadians were under siege by “racists” and “misogynists.” The accusations were as reckless as they were false. The government’s real grievance was not chaos but defiance.
Then came the Emergencies Act. Designed for war, invasion, or insurrection, it was now deployed against citizens with flags and thermoses. Bank accounts were frozen without charge or trial. Insurance policies were suspended. Police weilding clubs were unleashed against unarmed citizens. The federal government did not enforce the law; it improvised it.
A faltering government declared itself the victim of its citizens. The Emergency declaration was not a reaction to danger; it was a confession of political insecurity. It exposed a leadership that could not tolerate dissent and recast obedience for peace.
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The convoy’s organizers, who kept the protest largely peaceful, were arrested and prosecuted as though they had plotted sedition. They were charged for holding the line, not for breaking it. The state’s behaviour was vindictive, not judicial. Prosecutors went along with it, and so did courts.
In a healthy democracy, such political trials would have shaken Parliament to its core. Legislators would have demanded justification for the use of emergency powers. The press would have asked precisely which law had been broken. Citizens would have debated the limits of government in times of fear, times which seem to continue just under the radar.
Not much of that happened.
Canada’s institutions have grown timid. The press is subsidized and more subservient. The courts happily defer to the administrative state. Law enforcement has learned to follow politics before principle. Academics have been lost for about generation. Under such conditions, how can citizens object to unscientific and coercive policies? What options remain when every channel of dissent—media, science, judiciary, and law enforcement—is captured or cowed?
The convoy’s protest, let’s remember, was not the first major disruption in the Trudeau years. A year earlier, Indigenous activists blocked rail lines and highways in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposed to a pipeline. The blockades cost the economy millions. They were called “a national conversation.” Few arrests, no frozen accounts, no moral panic.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter marches were cheered by politicians and news anchors. Some protests were peaceful, others destructive. Yet they were treated as expressions of justice, not extremism.
Even today, pro-Hamas Palestinian demonstrations that include violence and intimidation of Jewish citizens are tolerated with a shrug. The police stand back, bring them coffee, citing “the right to protest.”
Why, then, was the Freedom Convoy treated as a crisis of state?
In a liberal democracy, protest is not rebellion. It is a civic instrument, a reminder that authority is contingent. When a government punishes peaceful protest because it disapproves of the message, it turns democracy into décor.
The trials of the convoy organizers are therefore not about law but about legitimacy. Each conviction signals that protest is permitted only when it pleases the powerful. This is the logic of every soft tyranny: it criminalizes opposition while decorating itself with the vocabulary of rights. I see this daily in Nicaragua, my native land.
The truckers’ protest revealed what the pandemic concealed. The COVID regime was unscientific and incoherent. It punished truckers who worked alone in their cabs while allowing politicians to mingle maskless at conferences. It barred unvaccinated Canadians from air travel but allowed infected citizens to cross borders with the proper paperwork. It closed playgrounds and churches while keeping liquor stores open.
These contradictions were not mistakes; they were instruments of obedience. Each absurd rule tested how much submission people would endure.
The truckers said, “Enough.” I am grateful that they did.
For that, Chris Barber (Big Red) and Tamara Lich 
are still being punished. Their trials have now concluded, save for possible appeals, yet their quiet defiance remains one of the few honest moments in recent Canadian history. It showed that courage is still possible, even the state seems to forbid reason.
The government’s response revealed the opposite: that fear, once politicized, is never surrendered willingly. The state that learned to rule through emergency will not soon unlearn it. They cling to its uses still.
Canada lives with the legacy of that winter today. The trials are finished, but the divisions persist. Half the country still believes the convoy was a menace; the other half thinks it was a mirror that showed how fragile our freedoms had become.
Trudeau’s government is no more, yet the spirit of his politics lingers. He did not create the divisions by accident. He cultivated them as a strategy of control. The country that left him behind is also less free, less trusting, and less united than it was before the horns sounded in Ottawa. Carney’s government is Trudeau’s heir.
The trials and sentencing measure the distance between the Canada we imagined and the one we inhabit.
The truckers’ convoy was imperfect, yet profoundly democratic. It stood for the right of citizens to say no to a government that had forgotten how to hear them. The echo of that refusal still moves down the Trans-Canada Highway. It is the sound of liberty idling in the cold, waiting for a green light that will not soon come.
This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for the abounding love and understanding in my life. I am grateful for my spirited children and their children. I am grateful for my nonagenarian father and for my siblings. I’m grateful for the legion of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews on all sides of the family. I am grateful for loyal friendships and for my colleagues and coworkers who share the quest for a freer country. I’m grateful to my adoptive Alberta, and Albertans, also struggling to be strong and free.
I am grateful for the Truckers, wherever they came from, for their courage.
Haultain Research is a reader-supported publication.
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From LifeSiteNews
Receiving four or more COVID shots was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold in children, a new study found, and another one linked the shots to higher risk of renal dysfunction.
Two major new studies have been published sounding the alarm about the COVID-19 shots potentially carrying risks of not only respiratory diseases but even kidney injury.
The Washington Stand first drew attention to the studies, published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID) and International Journal of Medical Science (IJMS), respectively.
The first examined insurance claims and vaccination records for the entire population of South Korea, filtering out cases of infection prior to the start of the outbreak for a pool of more than 39 million people. It reported that the COVID shots correlated with mixed impacts on other respiratory conditions. A “temporary decline followed by a resurgence of URI [upper respiratory infections] and common cold was observed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic,” it concluded. “In the Post-pandemic period (January 2023–September 2024), the risk of URI and common cold increased with higher COVID-19 vaccine doses,” it noted.
Children in particular, who are known to face the lowest risk from COVID itself, had dramatically higher odds of adverse events the more shots they took. Receiving four or more was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold, 91% higher likelihood of pneumonia, 83% higher likelihood of URI, and 35% higher likelihood of tuberculosis.
The second study examined records of 2.9 million American adults, half of whom received at least one COVID shot and half of whom did not.
“COVID-19 vaccination was associated with a higher risk of subsequent renal dysfunction, including AKI [acute kidney injury] and dialysis treatment,” it found, citing 15,809 cases versus 11,081. “The cumulative incidence of renal dysfunction was significantly higher in vaccinated than in unvaccinated patients […] At the one-year follow-up, the number of deaths among vaccinated individuals was 7,693, while the number of deaths among unvaccinated individuals was 7,364.” Notably, the study did not find a difference in the “type of COVID-19 vaccine administered.”
The researchers note that this is not simply a matter of correlation, but that a causal mechanism for such results has already been indicated.
“Prior studies have indicated that COVID-19 vaccines can damage several tissues,” they explain.
“The main pathophysiological mechanism of COVID-19 vaccine-related complications involve vascular disruption. COVID-19 vaccination can induce inflammation through interleukins and the nod-like receptor family pyrin domain-containing 3, an inflammatory biomarker. In another study, thrombosis episodes were observed in patients who received different COVID-19 vaccines. Additionally, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with the development of myocarditis and related complications […] The development of renal dysfunction can be affected by several biochemical factors [26]. In turn, AKI can increase systemic inflammation and impair the vasculature and red blood cell aggregation. Given that the mechanism underlying COVID-19 vaccine-related complications corresponds to the pathophysiology of kidney disease, we hypothesized that COVID-19 vaccination may cause renal dysfunction, which was supported by the results of this study.”
Launched in the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in response to COVID-19, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) had the COVID shots ready for use in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a body of evidence steadily accumulated over the following years that they failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own. COVID was a sticking point for many in Trump’s base, yet he doggedly refused to disavow OWS.
Since leaving office, Trump repeatedly promoted the shots as “one of the greatest achievements of mankind.” The negative reception to such comments got him to drop the subject for a while, but in July 2022, he complained that “we did so much in terms of therapeutics and a word that I’m not allowed to mention. But I’m still proud of that word, because we did that in nine months, and it was supposed to take five years to 12 years. Nobody else could have done it. But I’m not mentioning it in front of my people.”
So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current vaccines optional but not supporting work to develop successors.
In early August, Kennedy announced the government would be “winding down” almost $500 million worth of mRNA vaccine projects and rejecting future exploration of the technology in favor of more conventional vaccines. Last week, HHS revoked emergency use authorizations (EUA) for the COVID shots, which were used to justify the long-since-rescinded mandates and sidestep other procedural hurdles, and in its place issued “marketing authorization” for those who meet a minimum risk threshold for the following mRNA vaccines: Moderna (6+ months), Pfizer (5+), and Novavax (12+).
“These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” Kennedy said, making good on his pledge to “end COVID vaccine mandates, keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable, demand placebo-controlled trials from companies,” and “end the emergency.”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
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Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
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