Political Trial Goes On in Canada — and Four Judges Are Acquitted | Opinion

Justin Trudeau’s political prisoners have been officially acquitted. A jury in Lethbridge, Alberta, found the remaining two Coutts Four defendants, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert, not guilty. The men were charged with conspiracy to murder over their participation in the nonviolent Truckers Freedom convoy in February 2022 and have been held in custody since then, denied bail despite having no history of violence or criminal records.

Their 30-month imprisonment and subsequent legal victory are not just a story of the Trudeau administration’s authoritarian abuse of power. They tell the story of a broader political battle between the professional managerial class across the West and the working class they rule over — and the cost to four working-class men of defending themselves.

Carbert and Olienick’s two co-defendants, Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, had all of their original charges dropped as part of a plea deal that allowed them to be released from custody in February, a week before they were to spend two years in the prison purgatory known as pretrial detention. With two fewer defendants, the Crown’s “conspiracy” charge was already on shaky ground before Olienick and Carbert’s trial began in earnest on June 6.

But it was clear from the outset that this was a political trial, as Olienick’s lawyer pointed out in her opening statement, echoing the concerns of many Canadians who witnessed with horror the treatment of the Coutts men.

Three men were arrested in Coutts, Alberta, on the evening of February 13, 2022, when Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers raided a private property where Carbert, Olienick, and Lysak were staying; they arrested Jerry Morin the next day on his way to work. The Coutts Four were demonstrating against Justin Trudeau’s COVID regime, one of many Freedom Convoy protests taking place across the country. Like their brethren in Ottawa, hundreds of truckers and farmers used their trucks and equipment to slow traffic at the Coutts border crossing, near Sweetgrass, Montana. Although traffic was not completely blocked by protesters and other nearby border crossings were accessible, the slowdown at Coutts, along with the complete highway blockades set up nearby by the RCMP in Milk River, Alberta, was expected to impose significant costs on the Alberta economy.

The real crime of the protests, however, was their skepticism of the government of Justin Trudeau, which they represented. The next day, Trudeau invoked the Emergency Act, suspending the civil liberties of all Canadians, to crush the Freedom Convoy, using the accusations against the Coutts protesters as a major factor.

That’s why Trudeau needed the Coutts Four to be attempted murderers: To justify this authoritarian move, he had to prove that there was a real threat at the time, not just his desire to wield raw power, and the Coutts Four provided the fodder. Their case was used not only by Trudeau but also by his ministers as one of the main reasons for invoking the Emergencies Act; Justice Paul Rouleau cited the Coutts situation in his “reluctant” support for Trudeau’s use of the Act as part of a mandatory investigation into that invocation.

Trudeau and his government seized on incriminating claims by undercover police officers about the Coutts Four and their rhetoric as evidence of their brutal nature, which was then used by the Canadian media to smear the men in the days and months after their arrests. (The smear operation was so toxic that the men’s lawyers filed an injunction against the publication of the officers’ notes, which the media largely ignored.)

But it was revealed during the trial that none of the undercover officers’ claims had any evidence to back them up—no video, no body-worn camera footage, nothing. When the court was played a video recording of Tony Olienck’s interrogation by the RCMP, nothing he said supported the murder conspiracy charge. Text messages and group chats obtained by the RCMP also contained no direct threats of violence, much less evidence of any murder conspiracy. The trial devolved into a convoluted debate over the meaning of emojis and Olienck’s criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and the United Nations.

In addition, documents obtained through an access to information and privacy request showed that the RCMP profiled protesters by running license plates against databases and then zeroing in on those who had federal firearms permits. It also revealed that Tony Olienick was targeted by the RCMP because an undercover officer overheard someone at the Smuggler’s Saloon, a bar in Coutts that has become a de facto meeting place for protesters, saying that Olienick was going to bring her some ivermectin, a drug that has been hotly contested for its use in treating COVID. In other testimony, we heard that Chris Carbert rejected COVID payments from the Canadian government that were given to businesses across the country in a vain attempt to keep the economy going under Trudeau’s oppressive orders.

Carbert and Olienick were acquitted of conspiracy to murder, but found guilty of misdemeanor embezzlement and “possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose” for storing small hunting rifles in Carbert’s trailer on a nearby property. What that “dangerous purpose” was remains a mystery in the jury’s mind, because the prosecution, having failed to prove conspiracy to murder, also failed to establish any dangerous intent on the part of Carbert or Olienick.

But their ordeal wasn’t over yet. After the verdict was read, the men’s defense attorneys asked for immediate bail hearings so the men could be released until sentencing, which was tentatively scheduled for Aug. 12, but Crown prosecutor Steven Johnston, sticking with Trudeau’s pound of flesh until the end, objected. The men remain in pretrial detention.

It’s early enough to be asking key questions, not just about a miscarriage of justice, but also about how the Canadian media did Trudeau’s dirty work by smearing four innocent men in the public eye by refusing to provide any counter-evidence or ask any questions about the strange circumstances surrounding the case.

Questions abound: Why were men with no criminal record or history of violence denied bail for two years?

Why were Jerry Morin and Tony Olienick held in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, an established form of torture, and denied necessary medical care?

The media in Canada has made other prison torture victims, Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, household names. Why not lift a finger to defend these men?

Ultimately, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert were charged with thought crimes, nothing more. Their convictions for these other lesser crimes, if not overturned, will set a dangerous precedent.

If they are lucky, Olienick and Carbert will be released to their long-suffering families after serving their sentences, their lenient sentences will be appealed, and perhaps an official inquiry will be held into what happened in this case in which Justin Trudeau’s paranoia and inability to confront democratic protests led to a deeply disturbing case of political prisoners being held in a modern Western state.

Gord Magill is a truck driver, writer, and commentator. You can find him at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.