While Americans rightfully resent the lockdowns, mask mandates, and other intrusions into their liberty that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic (not to mention politicians’ flouting of their own rules), most of us had it pretty easy compared to people elsewhere. In Canada, for example, pandemic restrictions were tighter and lasted longer than in the United States. That prompted public pushback culminating in the protest known as the Freedom Convoy and draconian retaliation against demonstrators by the Canadian government. While the government’s actions have since been ruled unconstitutional, two of the Freedom Convoy’s leaders have been convicted for their efforts and potentially face prison sentences longer than those handed out to killers and rapists.
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“The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime, as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber,” the CBC’s Arthur White-Crummey reported last week. “Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber.”
In April, Barber and Lich were acquitted of the most serious charges against them, including intimidation and obstructing police, for their role in organizing the 2022 Freedom Convoy that snarled traffic in Ottawa and elsewhere as truckers and their allies voiced displeasure with pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, and other violations of personal freedom. They were both convicted of “mischief,” however, and Barber was found guilty of counseling others to disobey a court order. It’s for these crimes that the Canadian government wants to imprison them for the better part of a decade. That’s a stiff sentence, even for those who commit much more serious crimes in Canada.
“It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years,” Tristin Hopper wrote for the National Post. He pointed out that in March, prosecutors sought no more than six years for a British Columbia man who sexually assaulted a baby. In 2022, an Edmonton man received a five-year sentence for killing two people while driving drunk; that was the same sentence given in 2019 to a Newfoundland man who was drunk when he killed a couple and seriously injured two other people. Five years was also the sentence sought for a Vancouver man who fatally stabbed a good Samaritan who intervened in a heated public argument.
Seven or eight years for mischievously organizing public protests against authoritarian government policies says a lot about the Canadian government’s priorities. That’s especially true given how far the Canadian government already went to punish participants in protests about which The New York Times editorial board wrote, “by the standards of mass protests around the world, the ‘Freedom Convoy’ snarling Downtown Ottawa ranks as a nuisance.” To deal with that nuisance, the government of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to compel private parties to help it end the protests and, in particular, to freeze demonstrators’ bank accounts and cut them off from funding.
“I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled last year, using a Latin term meaning “outside the law.” This handed a victory to protestors and also to anybody who favors restraints on government. In particular, Mosley found the Canadian government violated protestors’ rights to: freedom of expression; life, liberty, and security of the person; and protections against unreasonable search and seizure as specified in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our northern neighbor’s squishy and exception-riddled answer to the Bill of Rights.
The Trudeau government’s violations of fundamental rights would seem bigger transgressions than “mischief” committed while protesting against the excesses of that same government. But no Canadian federal officials face prison for their conduct, while Lich and Barber have been convicted of crimes for which prosecutors want them imprisoned for many years. That should seem strange to any normal person observing the proceedings. It has rightfully attracted criticism from the political opposition and from Canadian commentators.
“Let’s get this straight: while rampant violent offenders are released hours after their most recent charges & antisemitic rioters vandalize businesses, terrorize daycares & block traffic without consequences, the Crown wants 7 years prison time for the charge of mischief for Lich & Barber,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, responded to the prosecutors’ desired sentences in this case. “How is this justice?”
“After more than three years of court-imposed conditions, some time behind bars and a prosecution that turned entirely political, any jail time would be too much,” Brian Lilley warned in the Toronto Sun. “It shouldn’t matter your view of the Freedom Convoy and the three weeks that shook Ottawa; in Canada, we don’t jail people we disagree with politically.”
“At least, that isn’t part of our tradition, but in this increasingly polarized world, so-called ‘progressives’ seem to want to use every lever of the state to punish those they disagree with,” Lilley added.
In truth, Canada has become increasingly censorial over the years and its government intolerant of criticism and dissent.
“What is happening in Canada is a gradual suffocation of free expression,” Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 2023. “It is draped in a cloak of niceness, inclusivity and justice but it is regressive, authoritarian, and illiberal.”
Last year, a Leger survey found that “more than half of Canadians (57%) feel that freedom of speech is threatened in Canada.”
Truly horrible legislation that would have penalized online “hate speech” died when Trudeau’s government stepped aside early this year for elections won by his Liberal colleague, Mark Carney. That bill would have imposed potential life sentences for expression motivated by hate.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber aren’t facing quite so lengthy prison stays when the court hands down their prison sentences in October. But when governments want to lock up critics for longer than they imprison killers and rapists, you know that they see dissent as the worst crime imaginable.
