MONTREAL — After an unprecedented yearlong criminal trial in an Ottawa court, Judge Heather Perkins-McVey in an April 3 ruling convicted political activist Tamara Lich and trucker Chris Barber on the frame-up criminal charge of mischief. They face up to 10-year sentences. Lich and Barber were among the most prominent spokespersons for the 2022 trucker-led “Freedom Convoy,” a three-week mass protest in downtown Ottawa, Canada’s capital, demanding an end to job-threatening COVID mandates and other government policies.
The court will reconvene April 16 to set a sentencing date.
Lich and Barber were arrested Feb. 17, 2022. Three days before, then Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the draconian never-before-used Emergencies Act, claiming the protest created a “national public order emergency” and a “threat to national security.”
Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and now the prime minister, told the Globe and Mail during the Freedom Caravan that the protest was “sedition” and an “insurrection” that challenged Canada’s founding constitutional principle of “peace, order and good government.”
Trudeau used the Emergencies Act to send 3,000 heavily armed cops into downtown Ottawa to break up the protest. Last year a federal court ruled the application of the act against the truckers was illegal because there was no “national security” emergency, and its use violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Ottawa has appealed that decision.
“What are my options?” Lich told the online Rebel News April 9. “I can cower in the corner like I’m some kind of victim, which I am certainly not. Or I can hold my head up high.” She said she intends to fight to overturn her conviction.
“It seems like the threshold or the standard now for being convicted of mischief is basically if you get charged,” said Barber.
Under Canada’s federal criminal code, “mischief” is a serious charge, involving damaging public property and preventing people from access to it.
Lich and Barber each faced six charges, including intimidation, obstructing police and counseling others to do the same, as well as mischief. Perkins-McVey found them not guilty of intimidation and obstructing police. But, in addition to the guilty verdict on the mischief charge, she found Barber guilty of counseling others not to obey a court injunction banning truckers from blasting the air horns on their rigs during the peaceful encampment in downtown Ottawa.
Guilty of ‘sarcasm’
In issuing her ruling, Perkins-McVey pointed to TikTok videos Barber made as key evidence he was guilty of mischief. “My goodness, I had to watch all these TikToks because words themselves really don’t do them justice,” she said. “You need to see the sarcastic tone or hear it.”
The idea you can be convicted of a crime for having a “sarcastic tone” underscores the assault on freedom of speech in the case.
Last November, Pat King, another prominent spokesperson for the protest, was convicted on five charges, including mischief, counseling to commit mischief and counseling to obstruct a public or police officer, and sentenced to three months of house arrest. He had already spent nine months behind bars before being convicted of anything. Government prosecutors are appealing this sentence, demanding the maximum 10-year sentence.
‘Overturn the convictions’
“These convictions are a blow to the democratic freedoms of free expression and the right to assemble and to protest, rights working people need,” Philippe Tessier, Communist League candidate for Parliament in the Montreal electoral district of Bourassa in the April 28 federal election, told the Militant April 10. Tessier works as a conductor for the Canadian National Railway and is a member of the Teamsters union.
“Lich, Barber and King have been convicted for what they said to participants in the protest, not any action they took,” he said.
“Ottawa’s goal is to reduce the political space for working people to use our unions to fight back against the drive of the bosses and their government to make us pay for the deepening worldwide crisis of capitalism,” Tessier’s running mate, Katy LeRougetel, the Communist League candidate for Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle district in Montreal, said.
“In addition to demanding the repeal of the Emergencies Act, the labor movement should demand these convictions be overturned,” she said.