A trial is currently underway in Canada, and the rights of every Canadian citizen are at stake. Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert are facing farcical charges stemming from their participation in a peaceful protest against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's COVID-19 response. It turns out, the United States is not the only country where the ruling political establishment is using lawfare to test the limits of the freedoms we all once took for granted. Olienick and Carbert may be average working-class men, but their trial is comparable to that of President Trump's many legal battles; as in the U.S., the Canadian court system has been turned into a crucible upon which elite warfare is being waged against the masses—or their duly elected representatives.
Olienick and Carbert are the remaining two of a group of political prisoners arrested in Canada and held without bail since the Freedom Convoy in 2022. The Freedom Convoy was a populist revolt against Trudeau's authoritarian approach to COVID-19 in the form of a mass act of civil protest led by truck drivers. To combat this peaceful protest, the largest of its kind in Canadian history, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to suspend civil liberties across Canada, freezing bank accounts and laying numerous spurious charges against hundreds of peaceful protesters.
Olienick and Carbert were arrested February 13, 2022 in Coutts, Alberta, at a Freedom Convoy protest site the day before Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, along with two other men. The group came to be known as the Coutts Four, and they stand accused of some damning charges—conspiracy to murder police officers among them. The charges are completely bogus, yet throughout Canada, early reporting about the men painted them in such a negative light that that many people have presumed them guilty.
Their assumed guilt is tied up with Trudeau's larger effort to legitimize the use of the Emergencies Act against peaceful protestors; an inquest into Trudeau's suspension of civil rights surrounding the Freedom Convoy hinges on a conviction in the case of the Coutts Four. Needless to say, Trudeau and his supporters are anxious to win the case. Complicating this effort is the fact that two of the four men were released from prison and had all the original charges against them dropped.
In the meantime, Olienick and Carbert have been kept in a form of carceral purgatory called "remand" since being arrested for exercising their once-protected rights to protest. In this purgatory, where they do not have the normal rights afforded convicted felons, they have been denied access to necessary medical care, among other indignities, and Olienick had spent over 90 days in solitary confinement, which is considered torture in most civilized societies.
Olienick and Carbert's trial finally got underway earlier this month. What little coverage there has been of the trial proceedings has focused on testimony from the undercover officers who were casing the protesters. There is nothing by way of corroborating evidence or recordings of what the accused are alleged to have said, and the Crown's case relies entirely on a negative interpretation of their words based entirely on claims made by the undercover officers.
The story comes apart under the lightest scrutiny: A group of young female undercover officers were ostensibly sent in to investigate protesters tarred as extremists, who their superior officers suspected of having weapons and an intent to kill them. Yet these officers were sent in with no wires or recording devices of any kind, and no weapons to defend themselves.
Does this not raise some pertinent questions? Who authorized this undercover operation? Was it not convenient to make these allegations, given that the day after these men were arrested, the Emergencies Act was invoked? Why has it taken 28 months for such an important case to get under way? Why did two of the co-accused, Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, have all of the original charges against them dropped?
As the trial wears on and more details of the case are exposed, yet more questions will emerge.
Media coverage of this case has done a great disservice to the Canadian public in not asking these questions. Instead, the media has been cheerleading for a conviction before all the evidence is in by repeating the unsubstantiated claims of the officers and failing to report any countervailing evidence or context crucial to understanding the story.
If they were honest journalists, they would do what I did—a deep dive into the case which revealed the charges to be a load of garbage.
Canada has imported from the U.S. a novel and uniquely American strategy by which elites deal with democratic ideas and groups they don't like—namely, the use of lawfare. We're seeing manifested in Canada what President Trump went through with his recent conviction in a Manhattan kangaroo court on ridiculous charges prosecuted using novel ways of twisting legal theory.
And it's not just the Coutts Four. Hundreds of peaceful protesters have had to deal with spurious charges and lengthy court battles; the case against the faces of the Ottawa Convoy, Chris Barber and Tamara Lich, is ongoing, and is claimed to be the longest mischief trial in Canadian history.
The ruling class has shown that it is incapable of dealing with dissent and will abuse the legal system to attack dissenters, whether they are guilty of anything or not.
If the Canadian government can level ridiculous and baseless charges at people, throw them in jail for over two years while denying them bail for trumped up political reasons, and then have their friends in the media smear the accused, what right to protest does anyone have? What right to free speech, or to any other civil liberties?
The trial of these men in Alberta, like the trial of Donald Trump, raises serious questions about our democracy. It is clear that those in our ruling class would rather control the narrative so that you don't ask them.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, who writes at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com and can be found on Twitter @gordmagill.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
