Having been arrested on Feb. 17 for her role in the Ottawa trucker convoy, Tamara Lich was kept behind bars for 18 days before being released on the condition that she not conspire to vent her incendiary political views either online or elsewhere.
On June 16 she attended a gala held by the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms which had awarded her its George Jonas Freedom Award. The now deceased Jonas was a brilliant, rational defender of the “conservative” ethos. As photos of the evening’s ceremony emerged, it became clear it had been attended by at least one of those fellow “conspirators” she had been forbidden to see. On June 27 she was arrested once again and has been imprisoned ever since.
True North recently posted an interview with criminal defense attorney Ari Goldkind who made it very clear he was no fan of the trucker convoy. Yet while he thought its participants needed to be punished, he was absolutely appalled at the rhetoric being hurled at Lich by the crown attorneys consigned to prosecute her. The notion that she was a dire threat to Canada’s democracy, that she ought to spend as many as 10 years behind bars, led him to conclude that Canada under Trudeau had sunk to the level of a Third World country where the Rule of Law had become poisoned by crass political bias. This woman whose basic crime was to protest the policies of our Liberal government is being treated like a violent criminal, he lamented. Defense lawyer Lawrence Greenspan agreed, suggesting that Tamara’s offense in attending her award ceremony was “minimalist at worst.”
While most on the Left are motivated by good intentions, their lack of self-awareness, their failure to understand the dire consequences of their politics, is appalling. The Rule of Law must be equally applicable to all. It is otherwise but a tool of oppression. But there is no objectivity whatsoever to the contemporary cultural climate here in Canada or the States. Examples of this truth abound.
On Canada Day in 2021, Indigenous protesters destroyed statues of both Queen Victoria and Elizabeth in the vicinity of Alberta’s legislature to vent their outrage with Western Colonialism. The province decided not to press charges. Here in Hamilton, a downtown statue of Sir John A. was also toppled in 2021. City Council, rather than unequivocally condemning the act, released a statement which basically promised to be more sensitive to the Indigenous viewpoint. That that viewpoint is woefully biased, that MacDonald was significantly more than the racist implied by his detractors, was not apparently relevant.
The message implicit in such incidents is clear. Commit an act of violence on behalf of a cause sacred to the Left here in North America and you may not only escape prosecution but actually be praised by the mainstream media. How many members of Antifa or B.L.M. are behind bars as a result of the 2 billion dollars damage they inflicted on urban America in 2020? How many environmental radicals have been imprisoned for repeatedly disrupting energy projects duly sanctioned by the established authorities? Why did the Republicans have to remind Merrick Garland that American law specifically forbids protesters from haranguing Supreme Court Justices at their homes, such incidents occurring several times in the aftermath of the Roe v. Wade decision with no arrests whatsoever? Might the police have got involved had a mob of angry pro-lifers assailed the private residence of Kamala Harris? Of course they would have, and the outrage throughout the mainstream media would have been deafening! Why the difference? It’s simple. The Left “knows” it is right about everything and brooks no opposition.
A couple of days ago Kamala compared the cancellation of Roe v. Wade to the reinstatement of slavery! No room for discussion there, the life of a fetus not complicating her view whatsoever. Such sanctimonious, simple-minded self-righteousness being pandemic on the Left, it not only excuses its “social justice warriors” for breaking the law, it actually celebrates them! It is a recipe for the end of rational, civilized debate; indeed a recipe for the end of Democracy. The ultimate irony of this dementia, of course, is that those so afflicted actually condemn anyone who protests on behalf of political freedom as enemies of Democracy. Hence the absurd notion that Tamara Lich who dared protest our government’s draconian lock downs, ought to stay behind bars for several years!