Tamara Lich’s politics were obvious even before her involvement in the 2022 Freedom Convoy. Affiliated with the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta, she clearly saw that province’s secession from the country as the only way of escaping the Federal Liberal government’s attempts to stifle Western Canada’s oil industry. Deeming those attempts an abuse of political power, she naturally also saw the Trudeau government’s response to the Covid pandemic as equally oppressive. To those who cherish Freedom, she is a Libertarian, while her continuing prosecution by Canada’s courts suggests she is no more than an abject criminal!
The point The Rebel’s Ezra Levant tried to make in his Aug. 14 podcast was that Tamara’s continuing prosecution for “mischief,” which began in early Sept. 2023, is, whatever its final outcome, the means by which both the Federal Liberals and Ontario’s “Conservatives” have sought to convince Canadians that you just don’t defy government edicts such as the various restrictive measures taken in 2020 in response to the Covid outbreak. Having spent 49 days behind bars and been burdened with approximately half a million dollars in legal fees which would have forced her to to succumb to a plea deal had she not been assisted by The Democracy Fund, her last 3 years, Ezra insists, entailed a level of persecution in no way warranted by her actions. As one of her lawyers, Eric Granger, has pointed out, not a single witness for the prosecution saw her do anything of a criminal nature. Feeling she was guilty of neither inciting or performing any act of violence, Tamara saw the Convoy as a legitimate protest against vaccine mandates placed on truckers which not only violated their democratic rights, but imperiled their ability to make a living.
On Jan. 23 of this year, our Federal Court ruled that the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, in its confiscation of private bank accounts and other such measures, was unreasonable and fundamentally a violation of our country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Does this ruling not by its very nature make Tamara as much a victim as a villain in her dealings with the government? Indeed does it not suggest the restrictions the Freedom Convoy was protesting may in fact have entailed an abuse of government power?
I understand that protests which disrupt public life in significant ways cannot be allowed to continue without some response from the Law. But what is appalling about our Western Leftocracies is their fanatical persecution of protesters who do Not share their world-view, vs. their hypocritical tolerance of those who Do. How many of the tens of thousands of BLM vandals who disrupted America in 2020 are behind bars? How many of the pro-Hamas demonstrators encamped on various public sites in both Canada and the States while chanting anti-Semitic slurs are under attack by the police? How intense has been the effort to catch and imprison those who have burned multiple Churches here in Canada over the last couple of years? Yet for 11 months now the Canadian legal establishment and its political instigators have hounded Tamara and her fellow accused, Chris Barber, for doing little more than questioning the authority of the Canadian government to impose various dictatorial restrictions on its citizens which seem inconsistent with the very definition of a Democracy.
As is typical of our contemporary cultural dementia, the mainstream media supported Trudeau in his narrative that the protesters who invaded Ottawa in Jan. of 2022 were violent, far-right extremists with racist tendencies. That some of them sported swastikas, we were told, was not intended as a comment on Trudeau’s politics, but as an expression of their very own. Yet while there were criminal acts that marred the 3 week event, the dozens of videos which I saw showed people of various races laughing, dancing, feeding the poor and generally celebrating their Rights as Canadian Citizens.
So in our contemporary world, BLM marauding through the cities of America throughout much of 2020 while causing over 2 billion dollars in damages, is generally exonerated as a justifiable quest for social justice. But Canadians whose major crime seems to have been that they clogged the streets of Ottawa for three weeks in protest of some radically restrictive government edicts, they’re characterized as a bunch of far-right fascists. Gee, isn’t this double standard itself a recipe for fascism? Isn’t the Left’s tendency to Cancel anyone who doesn’t bow before their many sacred tenets, the very essence of Fascism?