Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

COVID-19

Emergency of Under-Treatment – Panel of 8 prominent doctors and scientists say earlier treatment is the only way out of health emergency

Published

62 minute read

Produced by Roundtable Media

Panelists Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Brian Tyson, Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Heather Gessling, D. Brian McDonald, and Dr. John Littell discuss “Kids and covid”, “covid vaccines”, “variants”, and “your immune system”.  They also discus the controversy around Ivermectin and why that drug has not been approved to fight covid.

Most importantly, all 8 panelists call for the adoption of early treatment to turn covid from the terrible killer virus we now know, into one that even many of the most vulnerable can expect to survive.

Roundtable Media was launched in June, 2021 by Brock Pierce, James Heckman and David Bailey.  The Digital Media and Bitcoin Pioneers are setting out to finance and distribute the work of hundreds of the world’s top journalists, activists and news producers. Click here for more information about the Roundtable Media venture.

This discussion was moderated by Rob Nelson, a former Executive Producer/Anchor with ABC, FOX, UPN, E! and A&E.  Click here to see the biography of Rob Nelson, as well as the principle members of Rountable Media.

Unfortunately Youtube keeps taking down the video.  We will check periodically and load the actual video when/if it comes up again.  You can see it at this link.

In the meantime, the transcript is attached.

Panelists included Dr. Robert Malone, Inventor of mRNA technology, Dr. Ryan Cole, Mayo Clinic-trained, board certified pathologist who has diagnosed 300,000 patients, Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D, M.P.A, a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist and President, Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, leader in intensive care and author of medical student textbooks used across the world. Kory has influenced the standard of care for COVID and given US Senate testimony.

Also on the panel were Dr. Richard Latell, a Family practice doctor, Dr. Heather Gessling, MD, FABFM, a Hospital Chief of staff that has been working with children and families around COVID since the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Mark MacDonald, Psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Tyson, who has possibly treated more COVID patients than anyone in the world, seeing over 6,000 of them, Dr. Richard Urso, an Ophthalmologist and inventor of FDA-Approved wound healing drug and an eye surgeon with one of the largest clinics in the country and has spent the last year and a half deep in COVID, Mathew Crawford, a Biomedical statistician with Metaprep Education Group and Moderator Rob Nelson.

Moderator: We are seeing a spread of Delta right now. Officials say we’re all going to get Delta. Should we be scared? Is Delta upon us? Are we in a permanent pandemic right now?

Dr. Richard Urso, MD FAAO: It’s like the same song, second verse. We’re going to keep seeing variants. It’s normal. I don’t expect that to change. We’re vaccinating in a very narrow framework. And so when you vaccinate just the spike, you’re going to get variants because we are doing very specific treatments, what you’re seeing now in the Delta variant is you’re seeing the same thing. Just a small change will allow the virus to mutate and get around that and you’re going to see this happen over and over again.

Moderator: Dr. Malone, We’re seeing all these variants and I think the question people often ask is, why?

Dr. Malone: This is really controversial. There’s a lot of discussion that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated and the unvaccinated are the ones that are driving these escape mutants. That from a fundamental evolutionary standpoint, as a molecular virologist, doesn’t make sense. This virus now is known to mutate and throw off mutants at a much higher rate than we expected it to be. So there are very many mutants. The virus is evolving very rapidly. This is akin to what happens if you overuse antibiotics. So in sum, what we’re doing with universal vaccination is driving towards this end point of vaccine resistant mutants. We don’t have to.

Moderator: So it sounds like we’re on the defensive. We’re trying to defensively vaccinate our way out of something that we’re already deeply in.

Dr. Cole: Here’s my optimistic view on Delta. Yes. Delta’s new, it’s shaped differently. Technically it has escaped the antibodies from the vaccine. So we give a shot, give another shot and say, we’re going to give a booster with the same shot for a virus that existed five variants ago. It’s like saying to healthcare workers, we’re going to give you a flu shot for the upcoming flu season, but we have leftover flu vaccines from four or five years ago in the freezer. Illogical, no common sense in that whatsoever. So the variant has escaped it. And if you use a vaccine only approach you select for these variants, my optimistic point is Delta is a wildfire. A lot of people are going to get it. If you look at countries that handled it right, the death rates from Delta in most countries were far lower from this variant than other variants. So I want to give that optimistic message. Does it mean people aren’t going to get sick, not be hospitalized, not going to die? No, it doesn’t mean that, but what we do need to look at, is early treatments because if you’ve been vaccinated, I think scientifically we need to be 100% honest with everybody and say, even if you’re vaccinated or you’re not. We can get the virus now, vaccinated or not. And the vaccinated can carry equal or higher viral loads.

Dr. Kory: This path that we’re on, which is this sort of monolithic vaccine only strategy. We’re explaining the science, why that can’t be the only solution. We can not vaccinate ourselves out of this problem. The positive that I want to say is that there we know of strategies. They’re actually largely being ignored and suppressed. And I don’t want to sound conspiratorial about this, but the reason why is because there’s still a firmly held belief that the vaccines will solve this. The evidence that you just articulated is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that that’s not true. And so my hopes are that more and more attention is going to be paid to the other strategies, which have so far been ignored, which is that of early treatment. Especially now that the vaccinated are getting sick. Many of the vaccinated, many people were led to believe that if you get your vaccine, we’re going to end this thing. You don’t have to worry about it. You can carry on with your lives. But guess what, we’re talking about variants. My colleagues are now talking about even scarier variants that are coming. And so we need more tools to fight this. We need more weapons to fight this. And guess what the positive message is. We have them. And I’ll tell you the strategies that we have are independent of the variants. They can handle any variant that comes at us. We just need to get that message out.

Moderator: None of you are against vaccinations in general, meaning the idea of vaccinating, you probably all have vaccinations. Your kids have vaccinations, your family, right? Is that a fair statement?

Dr. Cole: That’s a fair statement. I’ve had all my childhood vaccines as have my children. I’ve had plenty of military vaccines back in the day. I’m not anti-vaccine, never have been, but I am pro good science. And right now there’s science that’s very questionable with something that’s very quick and we’re seeing things that we’ve never seen before. So I’m hesitant in this regard.

Dr. Malone: I think that the vaccines need to be used intelligently. That’s my objection. And as Dr. Cole has mentioned this set of vaccines that we have right now, Moderna, Pfizer and J & J, they’re all gene therapy based vaccines. And they all have a common problem. They only have one antigen: the spike antigen. And when they were developing them, they didn’t realize that spike was biologically active–no fault of theirs. Everybody was in a rush. It was the fog of war and they made decisions on the fly. But now it’s time to take a breath and say, ‘Hey, does this really make sense? And where does it make sense?’ We don’t have to be just left or right. Pro or anti-vaccine, there’s a middle ground. And I’m suggesting, and I think we all are aligned that what we’re talking about is intelligent deployment, strategic and tactical deployment of vaccines. We, as a community, need to protect these people at high risk, not just here in our community, in our states, in my opinion, we need to protect the elders throughout the world. We don’t need to hoard all the vaccine for people that don’t really need it. We need to make it available across the world for all cultures, for those people that are at very high risk.

Moderator: Dr. McDonald, you’ve talked a lot about fear and about how you feel the pandemic has created almost an incurable fear.

Dr. McDonald: I think fear has really been the driving force of this pandemic from the very beginning. I said, as early as may of 2020, that we’re not in a medical pandemic, we’re in a fear of pandemic. I think that it is evolved. However, a bit beyond fear. I think that what’s driving the fear now is propaganda.

Moderator: Your point is it’s really messed kids up. And that struck me the first time I heard you say that, that, that kids, unlike adults, don’t just bounce back. That’s your point kids. And you said, you think an entire generation of kids has been screwed by this, that they will not get their psychological health back, which is really depressing. If that’s true.

Dr. McDonald: I work with children. I see kids all day long. I’m a child psychiatrist. This is happening all the time. Every day in my practice. My concern is that the developmental stage that children need to go through: babies. toddlers, young adults, is being foreclosed on them. Brown university department of pediatrics published a study two weeks ago that found that babies born after January 1st, 2020, which is when this whole pandemic started, have a IQ point drop of 20 points compared to babies born before January 1st, 2020. That’s huge. Why? They don’t see faces. They don’t play, they don’t have exposure to friends. They don’t go to school. They’re basically locked in their homes, looking at their parents for a year and a half. And their brains have not developed. My concern is that we are building a generation of young people who are so traumatized that they will never fully recover from this. And even if we give them therapy and treatment, they’re always going to be damaged. They’re always going to be scarred emotionally. I don’t mean for it to be depressing. I mean, for it to be alarming so that everyone can finally say “stop.” We’ve got to stop the damage and then figure out what to do about it.

Moderator: What does the damage to you guys actually mean?

Dr. Heather Gessling: I’ll speak to that. I think stopping the damage means to acknowledge what we have done wrong. I think that we should reverse all of the measures that have been implemented. I feel like patients, families, and parents should take it upon themselves to feel empowered. We need to get back to the basics because we’ve done this wrong for so long. It’s been so damaging. One of the books that I had in medical school and that we all had in medical school was Harrison’s principles of internal medicine. This is basic medicine. This is what we have forgotten. “Many specific host factors, (That’s us) influence the likelihood of acquiring an infectious disease, age, immunization history, prior illnesses, level of nutrition, pregnancy status, coexisting illnesses, and perhaps emotional state all have some impact on the risk of infection after exposure to a potential pathogen. All we have done is focus on one of those–immunization history. And so the factors level of nutrition, emotional state, as we have discussed can not be underestimated. The ability to provide early effective treatment should make us feel empowered. We should not feel afraid anymore.

Moderator: Are kids more at risk? The numbers don’t seem to suggest that. I mean, the number of deaths of kids from COVID was lower than the number of deaths from the flu. But now people are saying Delta’s more severe. So are kids at risk?

Dr. Urso: I’ll just give a few statistics. There are about 330 children that have died of COVID in a year and a half. There’s typically about 50,000 children per year, who die. Many more have died of drowning and car accidents. So if we look at the relative risks, COVID has killed about 330 children in the last year and a half. So I think you need to look at that as you look forward to the risk to children. Do they spread? No, they don’t spread. There’s at least seven different studies that show that essentially the spread of children to adults is close to zero. So children are not super spreaders and children don’t die from the disease.

Dr. Tyson: I own three urgent cares in the Imperial valley area, which is one of the hotbeds for COVID-19 because Mexicali sits right across from us. That’s two and a half million people. So we see about 200 to 300 patients a day. I don’t do telemedicine. We do straight face-to-face encounters. So one of the things that I wanted to differentiate was,’Are these infections truly COVID?’ because they have the cough, cold and rhinitis and sore throat. Or, are there other viruses going on? So I decided to buy a $100,000 PCR machine, and we’ve been running these PCR tests. And recently I can tell you, we’ve seen 90% of rhinovirus and also RSV in the kids. So RSV typically is a winter illness. It causes pulmonary symptoms. It causes pulmonary bronchiolitis, not bronchitis, but bronchiolitis in the lower, lower airways. And that’s why the kids are having trouble right now. It’s not in my opinion from COVID, but from RSV.

Moderator: Clearly, kids are being hospitalized. I know the CDC recently said it’s actually not a higher proportion, it’s the same proportion, but kids are getting sick.

Dr. Tyson: You’re correct to say, kids are getting sick. And, under that CDC data that Dr. Ursa was talking about, healthy children didn’t die from COVID-19. Okay. It was those children who had four or five risk factors, morbid obesity being number one, diabetes being number two and weakened immune system being number three, kids on chemotherapy and things like that. So, it’s no different than RSV, rhinovirus, influenza, that would normally take out these kids anyway, unfortunately. But yes, we are seeing a higher number of COVID cases in the morbid obese and the severity of illness in the morbid obese in kids is problematic.

Moderator: Do healthy people die of COVID? I mean, is it all comorbidities? Is it obese people? Is it people with, you know, immunocompromised?

Dr. Kory: Greatest predictor for dying from COVID is age. With every decade of life, your risk goes up and it’s a straight line. Then you have to worry about comorbidities, right? So, the diseases that they have make them more prone like obesity and diabetes. However, we are seeing younger people now coming into ICU. We are seeing relatively healthy people die. We’re now seeing people with less comorbidities than before in the first wave last spring, almost everybody was either obese or diabetic. Now we’re seeing much less of that. You know? So when my colleagues said not one healthy kid died of COVID, I would also like to say, I don’t believe that there’s anybody who’s died who’s gotten an effective early treatment.

Dr. Urso: People don’t die of the virus. They die of inflammation and they die of thrombosis. Do we have drugs for inflammation that are not off-label, steroids? There’s a bunch of drugs that are on-label that can be used for the purpose of inflammation in this disease. These are not controversial topics. There are many, many different products we can use: Lovenox, Aspirin, Eliquis, XARELTO® . There’s a bunch of drugs for thrombosis. So when people say they died of COVID, they died of an inflammatory thrombotic disease. They didn’t die from the virus running through their body. Hopefully at some point we’ll have a really good early, early treatment that’s directed to the virus itself. Right now, we have other treatments as Dr. Kory said, they weren’t originally designed for this virus, but they are very effective against this virus.

Dr. Latell: What we’re seeing now is that patients are getting early treatment with medications, such as Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and a host of other medications because of this free exchange of ideas and this group of physicians and others around the world.

Moderator: One thing I think we’ve all seen, Ivermectin is a great example, where the media has politicized the issue. So depending on your politics, you’re going to see one or two different things. And you’re going to hear, “oh, well, it’s horse medicine. People are taking horse medicine. But Ivermectin is an FDA approved drug for human treatment.

Dr. Kory: It’s how the system is designed, which is largely against the use of repurposed drugs. If you know what a repurposed drug is, it’s generally a drug that’s off patent and not profitable. It’s been approved for use in another disease for which it’s found to be effective. So Ivermectin is well known as an anti-parasite. In fact, the discoverers won the Nobel prize because it eradicated two globally endemic parasitic diseases. I mean, it transformed the health status of good portions of the world. We knew on the ground that corticosteroids were going to work. We knew it because of our experience treating severe lung disease. We started using it. And guess what we started to see? As we started to use steroids, people started to come off ventilators.

People who were needing oxygen were coming off oxygen, getting discharged. The entire landscape changed. And I went into the US Senate, and I testified to the world that it was critical we use corticosteroids in the hospitalized patient. And I did that at a time where every national international healthcare agency was recommending against its use because they thought it would increase mortality. And I got heavily criticized for that. It’s now the standard of care worldwide. Everything else that we’ve discovered, everything that’s in our protocols is because we have used good clinical sense, lots of experience. And we’ve used trial and error using our best judgments of risks and benefits. We don’t want to cause harm, but undertreatment and nontreatment is harm, I think this is a pandemic of undertreatment. Long-haul COVID is only caused by one thing–undertreatment. Hospitalized COVID is only caused by one thing–undertreatment. I’m even going to push the envelope here. Getting COVID is only caused by one thing, which is a lack of an effective preventative strategy. I thought, everyone thought and hoped it was going to be the vaccine. It’s not.

Moderator: You’re saying getting COVID itself is completely preventable?

Dr. Kory: There’s a number of agents that have been shown, if you take them regularly, your chances of getting COVID are far lower. For me the most effective is Ivermectin. There are dozens of trials. We’re now up to 14 trials with thousands of patients. In the trials which you take it the most frequently, you’re nearly perfectly protected from getting COVID. It is a highly effective agent. The reason why Ivermectin is so important in this disease is that it has numerous mechanisms of action. The most important mechanism is that we know it binds tightly to the spike protein. The spike protein on this virus is how it gets into our cell, how it’s allowed to replicate. If you can bind it, you can block it and you can prevent yourself from getting sick. The one caveat though, is what we’ve learned is that in the Delta variant, just like the vaccines, we have started seeing breakthroughs. So we have to change our dosing strategy of all of the trials done on Ivermectin. The strongest evidence is actually in prevention. It is a wickedly effective, highly potent preventative agent. You, if you take it regularly, your chances of getting sick or near nil.

Moderator: Matthew, you’ve done a lot of statistical research, particularly around the success of early treatments and it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. Why don’t you take a second and talk about your findings?

Mathew Crawford: So early on, I was a little frustrated, not seeing much analysis. And so I started to reach out to doctors that I knew and said,”What do you see? And, numerous doctors told me “I’m using this and it looks good” and there wasn’t much data out. So I kept reaching out to more and more doctors around the world and eventually collected about 20,000 data points. And this is almost a year and a half ago. And it looked like those who were using Hydroxychloroquine, and especially if they included Azithromycin and zinc, or possibly another macrolide other than azithromycin, but with the zinc in particular, it looked to everybody in their communities about a 98% lower mortality rate. And this was across like seven different nations I got this data from, so put all this together and it was tens of thousands of data points by the end of last year. But it’s difficult to get a lot of this data published. I’m working on Dr. Tyson’s data right now, and we’ve had the results for months, but it’s difficult to get it published. Anything that goes against the narrative takes longer in peer review.

Moderator: Is that a valid thing that it would take longer? I mean, is that understandable or is that politics?

Mathew Crawford: “I think there’s some politics involved.”

Moderator: Dr. Tyson you’ve said you have how many deaths out of the 6,000 people you’ve treated.

Dr. Tyson: So with treatment starting from day one to 7, zero.

Moderator: Zero deaths.

Dr. Tyson: Right. With treatment starting from day seven to 14, I have four. Two died the same day they showed up at the clinic and two died in the hospital.

Dr. Gessling: And I want to say, my numbers exactly match up with Brian’s. I’ve treated about 1500 and I have had one death. And it was because there was some delay in treatment. And I know that several physicians who have treated didn’t have any deaths until approximately July, August. And that was with the change in the virus. Within a week or two, all of us were saying the exact same thing–something has changed. What do we need to do to change the protocol?

Moderator: Dr. Gosling, you’re treating vaccinated and unvaccinated,

Dr. Gessling: Absolutely. Vaccinated and unvaccinated. And so I would say in July, the majority of my sicker patients were unvaccinated. And then I noticed in August, it seemed to be about 50-50, and now it’s more vaccinated. And so it happened as a very quick change in my practice.

Dr. Latell: Dr. Tyson, Dr. Gosling and myself are family physicians. Okay. So we are the folks who have been in those front lines, getting the phone calls in the middle of the night from concerned parents. And what you’ve just heard from Dr. Kory is that if you take the right preventive plan of medications, either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or both, you’re approaching 0% mortality.

Moderator: I Hear your passion and understand where you guys are out there in the trenches. It’s bizarre that we are facing a pandemic that has left us where we are clearly divided about the simplest thing of treatments. They’re not all going to work. Some are going to fail. You’re going to experiment, but in most diseases, doctors get in there and you figure it out. And in this one, for some reason, we got blocked into this thing where it’s like, no, no, no. And I think you have an opinion, partly why.

Dr. Kory: If we have a solution or we have effective treatments. Why aren’t they being recognized and disseminated across the world? And there’s really two forces that I think we’re up against. The first force is that in general, our health agencies are suffering what’s called regulatory capture. They’re largely driven by financial interests, external financial interests that are really influenced in making sure that the solution to the pandemic is one that is profitable. Vaccines are profitable. The other challenge that we were having, which is somewhat overlapping is that academia, which we call the ivory towers, the big academic institutions in the last 10 years, there’s been this increasing belief into the idea that the only proof of efficacy of a drug has to come out of a large double-blind randomized controlled trial. When you do a randomized control trial, you have to first make the diagnosis. Everyone has to have a positive test. They have to have symptoms. They have to be enrolled consented, randomized, and then the drug is delivered. Each one of those steps takes time. And so by the time they do these randomized control trials, oftentimes it’s very delayed. And oftentimes it’s underdosed because they’re using doses that I was using six months ago. We move with this pandemic because we can’t prove it with the one tool that we need to prove it, we are getting suppressed. And that message is getting suppressed.

Moderator: Who funds big randomized controlled trials?

Dr. Kory: That would be pharma generally. Now there is philanthropy and there is the NIH. But the NIH and pharma are quite tightly linked.

Moderator: Let’s just take a minute and address some of the vaccine related questions that I think people have. And I want to start with you, Dr. Malone, if that’s okay, because you are the one of the architects of mRNA technology. And if I were to ask you Dr. Malone, are you against the vaccine for COVID? I know your answer would be absolutely not, but you do have some issues with this particular vaccine. Why?

Dr. Malone: So thanks for that opportunity to make the point that I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m a guy who spent the majority of my adult life developing vaccines and trying to get vaccines licensed. For example, the Ebola vaccine that we call the Merck vaccine. This is a technology platform (m RNA) that I believe and many believe has enormous promise. And right now it’s in its infancy. The safety of the underlying technology is not yet fully demonstrated. It hasn’t been fully characterized and that will come, that’s good news. However, in the fog of war and the need to come up with something, as soon as possible, some decisions were made to move things forward very rapidly. They were based on incomplete information. People did what they did in good faith and focused on a protein that they thought was fully safe–spike protein. But now over a year later, we know that, in the virus, this protein is responsible for much of the disease that the virus causes, the pathology in your vascular endothelial cells, the coagulation. And it’s unfortunate that this particular protein in what appears to be a biologically active form, was used in these vaccines.

Moderator: What is the result of that? What does that mean?

Dr. Cole: This is a thromboembolic disease. COVID is a clotting disease. Now, when we give a spike protein to Dr. Malone’s point, that is an active biologic molecule. We chose the wrong molecule that causes disease. So what do I see under the microscope? You see these COVID skin cases, you know, these weird COVID rashes. What is that? That’s clotting in the skin.

We unfortunately have doctors that say there’s no damage from the vaccines and no deaths from the vaccines. We should use the French legal system. When we have a new product that’s never been used on humanity in the market. It’s guilty until proven innocent.

Every time there is damage or disease from that product, we need to assume that it is guilty until we prove it isn’t. So under the microscope, we see clotting in the lungs. We see clotting and the vessels. We see clotting in the brain, not from the virus, but from the spike, from the vaccine itself. Now consider the numerator and the denominator are most people going to be fine? Yes. And I want to emphasize that in our data, around the world, from the United States, from the UK, from the Euro vigilance in Europe, we have seen more death and damage from this one medical product than all other vaccines combined in the last several decades. In just a short eight month window of time, it has done more damage than any other medical product therapy, shot, um, modality of anything we’ve ever allowed to stay on the market to this point. Do I mean to a sound alarmist? No, I’m being factual. And when I look at it under the microscope, and I see the parts of people or people that are no longer with us, the damage and the disease is caused by that spike protein. It is present.

Moderator: Common sense would tell me a vaccine’s efficacy is debatable, but you couldn’t possibly know if it’s safe because you would need five, 10 years to really know.

Dr. Malone: I love your approach of, ‘let’s just think for a minute, let’s just apply common sense.’ It normally takes a decade or more to produce a vaccine that is safe and effective. And to demonstrate that it’s safe, the usual standard with the FDA is that you allow at least two years after you have administered the phase three material to at least 3000 people for a vaccine. Often the FDA wants many more people than that. And you follow them for two years at least to see whether or not they’re generating auto immune problems, et cetera. And you’re dead on. I mean, you can do the math. Okay. Have shortcuts been taken? Normally it takes three years to evaluate the data. This vaccine was deployed in, you know, eight months. Six months or less after the phase three trials were completed. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the common sense that we don’t have the information. In terms of safety in pregnancy, reproductive, toxicology, reproductive risks, potential birth defects. The honest truth is whatever they tell you, we don’t have the data. So whomever is speaking, if they’re telling you that it’s safe, but they haven’t actually done the studies. I think you can figure out that means that they’re not being truthful with you.

Moderator: Were pregnant women even included in the clinical trials?

Dr. Malone: Of course they weren’t. The NIH just funded the study like a week ago on reproductive toxicology and birth defects in children. The major study on potential risks in pregnancy wasn’t started until almost a month after the CDC said it’s okay to go ahead and start taking the vaccine.

Dr. Ursa: For those who don’t know, a good percentage of the COVID vaccine, the spike protein, I’m sorry, the lipid nanoparticles actually goes to the ovaries. They knew this before they started, that this was what happens. So I do think while there might not have been intent, anybody who did that kind of work would know that they [lipid nanoparticles] would actually go to those places. That’s what they do. They go through those very easily. And of course they’re carrying spike protein, and spike protein we know is going to cause inflammation in the ovaries. What do we know about that? Well, as Dr. Malone said, we don’t know what that means. Is that going to affect fertility? We don’t know. We’ve got to hope and pray that it doesn’t because many people have taken that and they now have significant inflammation that has gone to those organs.

And so we literally have pregnant women coming in. One woman had two miscarriages during her 10th week and her OB actually told her to go get the vaccine. And he cannot know that that’s safe. It’s impossible. So she just happened to have miscarriages. She’s at high risk for another miscarriage. It’s a high risk pregnancy. There’s no reason to introduce any new therapeutic of any sort in this patient. So this is what we’re seeing: a one size fits all policy. That makes no sense, and we need to stop it. And we need to adopt early treatment and other measures.

Moderator: What if your COVID recovered? You may be vaccinated, but unvaccinated and COVID recovered is a whole unique group that you actually would argue has actually more immunity and is more valuable than all the others together.

Dr. Cole: A hundred percent true if you’ve had COVID, you’re done with COVID. We don’t need to modify mother nature. And if you think of what a vaccine is, a vaccine mimics a small portion of a natural infection. So to say, a natural infection is not equal to a vaccination is insanity. In vaccinology, we’re trying to mimic a part of nature, whereas mother nature does it right. If you have had COVID you may get it again, but you’re going to get it in a much more mild manner. So as to this two tier polarization of our society–a virus isn’t politically red or blue or purple –a virus is a humanitarian issue.

And when we divide ourselves in thought and don’t listen to science anymore, we’re going down the wrong path. When we look at what’s happened to the children, going back to the children point, half of kids in the U S have already had COVID, we’re not antibody testing. We’re treating everybody with this terrible oppression of you’ve got to wear a mask. It doesn’t matter that you had COVID, you know, you’ve got to stay home. If somebody in your classroom tests positive, it denies basic science. And this isn’t upper level immunology. This is basic immunology 1 0 1. And we are forgetting what our amazing immune system does. How many of you had chickenpox when you were a kid? Probably a lot. Okay. How many have you ever gotten them again? Yeah, no. Did you need a shot? No. Have any of you had a grandma who had measles and ever got measles again? No, because her immune system works.

Dr. Malone: This gets back to common sense. Why are they telling us that natural infection isn’t protective? Why are they telling us that those of us covered still got to get the jab. There is a financial incentive here. And if there are a few examples that make it so abundantly clear one is this crazy labeling of Ivermectin as a horse paste drug. I give ivermectin to my horses, but I don’t take the horse version for myself. You know? Um, and, And the other thing is this crazy messaging about natural infection. Why are they saying these things that make no sense?

Dr. Cole: If you are under age of 50 with no comorbidities your chance of dying from this disease are about nil. And if you get early treatment, they’re even closer to nil. So if you recovered, which half of the young people in North America are, you don’t need a shot and the shot can damage the heart of children. There are more children who’ve had myocarditis, and there’s never such a thing as mild myocarditis. That’s inflammation of the heart. Once you get inflammation, get scarring, those kids’ hearts are damaged for life. There are more kids, like 5, 10, 15 kids now that have died of heart attacks after the shots. 400 plus kids that have had myocarditis, that have damaged hearts for life. That’s more than the kids that have died from COVID. Now the ratio to damaged children is much higher than due benefit. And children survive this virus at a statistical 100%. Age zero to 18 – 99.97% of children survive this virus. So why are we punishing kids for a virus they survive? It’s illogical.

Moderator: There’s lots of people who got the vaccine and are wondering how risky it is.

Dr. Malone: Here’s what I do know about multiple boosters. The immune system is really, really complex. And it’s as complex as the nervous system, which by the way, comes from the same cell type–incredibly complex. And one thing as somebody that’s been in this business and had all this training for 30 years–more is not better. The assumption that another dose is going to boost your immunity, to levels that it was previously needs to be demonstrated clearly. And the safety of that needs to be demonstrated, because as immunologists, we know darn well, there’s a thing called high zone tolerance. More is not better. More can actually suppress the immune response.

Dr. Cole: After the extra shots, we’re seeing the depletion of certain cell types. To your point, we’re starting to document it and are studying it. And to his question, why give a third shot to a virus that was gone in January and February of this year? We’re on to Delta. The booster is not something new. It’s the same shot for the virus that’s gone. Delta’s a new virus, essentially. So is there any logic to boost something that’s not even here anymore? No.

Moderator: So we’re vaccinating for COVID and we’re already on to Delta now.

Dr. Cole: The strain that we made the sequence for the spike against isn’t even circulating anymore, it’s not even here. We’re, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 variants on from that. Delta is behaving as a new virus. The antibodies don’t neutralize it anymore, especially at the end terminal domain of the spike. It’s a wrong approach at this point. It is the wrong protein now, it’s not even a virus that’s here.

Dr. Littell: Everyone in my practice wishes and prays every day that COVID goes away. We don’t want to treat another patient with COVID ever, ever again, to be honest with you, my other patients have been neglected because of COVID. It’s impossible for us to keep up with the displaced.

Dr. Urso: We don’t have to know what pharma’s motives are. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not interested. What I’m interested in is a comprehensive plan. I’m interested in contagion control. I’m interested in vaccination. I’m interested in prophylaxis. I’m interested in early treatment. The motivation side doesn’t matter. It’s the data that matters in a comprehensive plan that matters. So we don’t have to fight and say, they’re bad. We’re good. It doesn’t matter. It’s a comprehensive plan that we need to emphasize that encompasses everything

The fact of the matter is what really matters is we need to do everything all at the same time, because that’s how we do it. That’s how we’ve always done it. We’ve never done it differently. It was a shock to us to find that people were not emphasizing early treatment. That is just something that is incomprehensible. And we still don’t know the answer and we don’t care. I don’t care. We’re just going to go forward.

Audience question: After 2020 do you think there was an emergency. Is there an emergency, now?

Dr. Kory: I’m an intensive care unit physician. I take care of the patients who come at the end of the line, and I will tell you, we still are having an emergency. This is an emergency situation. If you look around the United States, there are dozens of cities and areas where the hospitals are filling. The ICU’s are filling. This is an emergency of undertreatment. There’s undertreatment early. There’s undertreatment late in the hospital using low doses of corticosteroids when we have immense amounts of data, showing higher doses are lifesaving. Combinations of therapies are life saving. We know how to get these patients better, but we have to be more aggressive at every phase. Everyone is being restricted to following the protocols that come from the top. They’re not working, they’re failing. And that’s the emergency.

Moderator: I think there is a perception because it’s been very politicized. This whole COVID thing has just been exaggerated. Your issue is we’re not treating it. Not that it’s not a real deadly disease.

Dr. Kory: Yeah. I have to tell you my perspective is quite different. I’ve never, ever walked into an ICU that’s full of every patient on a ventilator with the same disease. I’ve never seen 24 patients on a ventilator with the flu at any one time. I’ve never seen dermatologists taking care of patients on ventilators in regular hospital floors. It is getting better. We’re not in that catastrophic phase, but this is the most complex and most violent disease that I’ve seen. And the most difficult to treat in the ICU. The trick is to avoid getting into the ICU.

Moderator: Can we VAX our way out of this? Is that possible?

Dr. Malone: Now, you can run the numbers. In order to get to herd immunity, you have to have a vaccine that’s generally more than 80% effective in preventing infection, not preventing disease. To block the spread in the CDC slide deck that they leaked to the Washington post, they showed clearly, even with Delta, let alone the new variants, we cannot stop the spread of Delta. If we were to vaccinate with these leaky vaccines, which efficacy in terms of prevention of infection is something between 40 and 60%. You could vaccinate the whole world with that and you still won’t stop the spread. What you will do is select for even more potent escape, okay. That are going to blow through those vaccines. And who’s going to die? The people that we wanted to protect in the first place. No, we can’t stop it. Can we make it worse? Yes.

Dr. Cole: Again, I’m going to put it in layman’s terms. You can’t play whack-a-mole with a vaccine with the variant. Because by the time you get vaccinated against the next variant, the new one’s here and then the new ones here, and you’re not going to roll out a new one every time. So to that point, you have to focus on treating early.

Moderator: It’s not as black and white or as simplistic as it seems. We need more than anything in this country right now, in this world right now, to start having conversations we’re not having and be willing to have them. Have the guts, to have them and hear what we’re not comfortable with.

 

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

Follow Author

Alberta

Alberta court upholds conviction of Pastor Artur Pawlowski for preaching at Freedom Convoy protest

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Lawyers argued that Pastor Artur Pawlowski’s sermon was intended to encourage protesters to find a peaceful solution to the blockade, but the statement was characterized as a call for mischief.

An Alberta Court of Appeal ruled that Calgary Pastor Artur Pawlowski is guilty of mischief for his sermon at the Freedom Convoy-related border protest blockade in February 2022 in Coutts, Alberta.

On October 29, Alberta Court of Appeal Justice Gordon Krinke sentenced the pro-freedom pastor to 60 days in jail for “counselling mischief” by encouraging protesters to continue blocking Highway 4 to protest COVID mandates.

“A reasonable person would understand the appellant’s speech to be an active inducement of the illegal activity that was ongoing and that the appellant intended for his speech to be so understood,” the decision reads.

Pawlowski addressed a group of truckers and protesters blocking entrance into the U.S. state of Montana on February 3, the fifth day of the Freedom Convoy-styled protest. He encouraged the protesters to “hold the line” after they had reportedly made a deal with Royal Canadian Mounted Police to leave the border crossing and travel to Edmonton.

“The eyes of the world are fixed right here on you guys. You are the heroes,” Pawlowski said. “Don’t you dare go breaking the line.”

After Pawlowski’s sermon, the protesters remained at the border crossing for two additional weeks. While his lawyers argued that his speech was made to encourage protesters to find a peaceful solution to the blockade, the statement is being characterized as a call for mischief.

Days later, on February 8, Pawlowski was arrested – for the fifth time – by an undercover SWAT team just before he was slated to speak again to the Coutts protesters.

He was subsequently jailed for nearly three months for what he said was for speaking out against COVID mandates, the subject of all the Freedom Convoy-related protests.

In Krinke’s decision, he argued that Pawlowski’s sermon incited the continuation of the protest, saying, “The Charter does not provide justification to anybody who incites a third party to commit such crimes.”

“While the appellant is correct that peaceful, lawful and nonviolent communication is entitled to protection, blockading a highway is an inherently aggressive and potentially violent form of conduct, designed to intimidate and impede the movement of third parties,” he wrote.

Pawlowski was released after the verdict. He has already spent 78 days in jail before the trial.

Pawlowski is the first Albertan to be charged for violating the province’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act (CIDA), which was put in place in 2020 under then-Premier Jason Kenney.

The CIDA, however, was not put in place due to COVID mandates but rather after anti-pipeline protesters blockaded key infrastructure points such as railway lines in Alberta a few years ago.

Continue Reading

C2C Journal

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part I

Published on

From the C2C Journal

By Lynne Cohen
In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.
As the 13-month-long trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber lurched into its final days at the Ottawa Courthouse, Assistant Crown Attorney Siobhain Wetscher reached for her highest dudgeon and broadest hyperbole. In making her closing arguments, Wetscher declared this to be an “overwhelming case” backed by an abundance of “significant evidence.” Attempting to draw the focus onto the assembled facts, she swatted away claims it was a politically-motivated prosecution. “The defendants are not on trial for politics,” Wetscher stressed. “They crossed the line, objectively. The smell, the noise, the harassment were not lawful!” Given the reaching tone and considering the actual weight of the evidence, it often seemed as if Wetscher was trying to convince herself as much as Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey.

To back their case, Wetscher and fellow Assistant Crown Attorney Tim Radcliffe had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that was projected onto two screens in Courtroom 5 during their final arguments. Entitled “R. v. Christopher Barber & Tamara Lich: Closing Submissions of the Crown”, the 106-slide exhibit began by listing the various charges: committing mischief, obstructing a peace officer and blocking a highway as well as counselling others to commit mischief, obstruct, block a highway and disobey a court order (the last one against Barber only). It also offered a quick guide to dozens of previous mischief, obstruction and intimidation judgements considered relevant to the case.

An “overwhelming case”: According to the closing arguments of Assistant Crown Attorneys Siobhain Wetscher (top left) and Tim Radcliffe (top right) presented in the Ottawa Courthouse, the trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber was not about politics, but the fact the pair “crossed the line” during the protest. (Source of bottom photo: CTV News)

Beyond a useful summary of the charges and case law, the Crown’s slideshow was also meant as one last reminder of the “significant evidence” arrayed against the Freedom Convoy pair. It thus contained numerous exhibits already submitted during the 45-day trial, including maps of the protest area, snippets from TikTok videos, transcripts from press conferences, witness testimony and interrogations as well as court orders, texts, letters, handbills, emails, Facebook posts and so on. As such, it serves as a kind of multimedia scrapbook for the entire three-week-long protest in Ottawa during January and February 2022.

And as is usually the case with scrapbooks, there were also plenty of photographs, presumably selected for the same reason as all the other evidence – because they bolster the case against Lich and Barber. In particular, the pictures are meant to provide proof of their close partnership in leading an unlawful protest and convincing others to break the law. But there’s a problem with this plan: none of the photos show either doing anything other than participating in an entirely peaceful, apparently constitutional and often quite-joyous-looking protest.

Slide 61, for example, shows the duo in winter gear hugging each other with big grins on their faces. Slide 76 has a smiling Lich explaining on TikTok that the protest is “like Canada Day on steroids.” Slide 100 is a screenshot of Lich on the verge of being arrested telling her Facebook supporters that, “I pray and hope that you will make your choices from love…we can only win this with love.”

And then there’s slide 106. The presentation’s last slide pairs a quote from Wetscher and Radcliffe with yet another picture of Lich and Barber. The text reads, “The Crown respectfully requests that the court find Mr. Barber and Ms. Lich guilty of all counts as charged.” The photo shows them together once more – again smiling broadly. This time they’re standing with Mike Stack, another protester, in front of Barber’s truck “Big Red”. If the point of this photo is to prove once and for all that Lich and Barber were engaged in a dangerous, insurrectionist conspiracy, it fails miserably.

The Crown’s 106-slide closing presentation served as a multi-media scrapbook of the three-week-long Freedom Convoy protest, inadvertently highlighting the event’s joyousness and peacefulness. Of note, the final slide (bottom) shows a smiling Lich, Barber and fellow protester Mike Stack – while Barber’s dog Zippy enjoys the view from the driver’s seat of Barber’s truck “Big Red”.

And hilariously – as a close inspection reveals Barber’s dog Zippy sitting in Big Red’s driver’s seat, mouth agape in a wild doggy smile, looking down upon the trio as if to say, “Look at me. I’m driving the truck!” For a criminal case that threatens Lich and Barber with a decade in jail for allegedly imperilling the very foundation of public order across Canada, and has consumed more than a year of precious court time, Zippy’s photo-bomb doesn’t answer the question of guilt, it raises an entirely different one.

Is this really the best the Crown can do?

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Long-Haul Trucking

On January 23, 2022, the Freedom Convoy began rolling out from Canada’s West Coast towards Ottawa, while other smaller groups of vehicles streamed westward from Quebec and other points. Three months earlier, the Government of Canada had unexpectedly announced that cross-border truckers who had not received a course of Covid-19 vaccination would have to isolate for up to two weeks when crossing the U.S.-Canada border, overturning an earlier exemption for the trucking industry. Despite furious pushback, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to relent and the mandate came into effect on January 15.

In response, thousands of truckers and others in cars and pickup trucks from all over the country joined the procession to make their feelings known, while thousands more waved them on from freeway overpasses and small towns along the way. Lich and Barber were involved in this movement from the beginning – creating social media accounts, setting up fundraising efforts and building an internal support structure – although the convoy itself defied organization. Lich and Barber may have been instrumental, but they were not almighty.

Let those truckers roll, 10-4: In January 2022, thousands of vehicles from across the country converged on Ottawa to protest a dramatic change in the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine policy for cross-border trucking. (Sources of photos: (top) Andrei Filippov/Shutterstock; (bottom) GoToVan, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Lich was born in Saskatoon to a Métis family and adopted as an infant. She has lived a varied life on the Prairies, working mainly as an administrator in the energy services sector and raising three children. She currently lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta with her husband Dwayne, who farms. She’s proud of her native heritage and also boasts of being a singer in a garage rock band. Lich has been politically active for many years, typically drawn to a robust defence of Western Canada’s political interests and consistently opposing the current Trudeau government. In 2018 she joined the “Yellow Vest” movement, and has also been a member of the Alberta Wildrose Party and the federal Maverick Party.

But it was the federal Liberals’ draconian response to the Covid-19 pandemic that pushed her activist inclinations into overdrive. “What kind of country had Canada become?” Lich would later write about the impact of vaccine mandates. “We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.”

As for Barber, he hails from the small southwest Saskatchewan city of Swift Current. The 49-year-old married father of two children owns and operates a trucking firm, C.B. Trucking Limited, which specializes in long hauls of agricultural equipment. His popular TikTok account @bigred19755 provided him with a platform to complain – often impishly – about the impact of government regulation on the trucking business. As would be expected, the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on his business. Barber got the vaccine shots as required, but disagreed with how they were imposed.

By the time they got to Ottawa: Lich (left, with husband Dwayne) of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Barber (right, with Big Red) of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, found themselves leading the Freedom Convoy as a result of their shared opposition to federal Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

“I was at risk of losing all that hard work [building my company] to not being able to cross the border anymore,” he explained to True North News. As his frustration with Covid-19 rules grew, Barber leveraged his status on social media to become a leading voice for truckers’ outrage over vaccine policy, which in turn spurred him to help launch the Freedom Convoy. “I was angry, very angry,” Barber later explained. “The provincial mandates, the federal mandates…it seemed like it was an over-reach.” From 30,000 followers prior to the convoy, Barber’s TikTok account grew to 170,000 by the time the truckers rolled into Ottawa.

When Lich, Barber and the rest of the original convoy reached Ottawa in late January, numerous other groups and individuals unaligned with the initial organization had joined the protest for their own reasons, and with their own objectives, timelines and standards of behaviour. What most participants had in common was a deep antipathy towards the Trudeau government and a desire to make this known in the heart of the nation’s capital. Their right to do so peacefully was initially acknowledged by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). As they arrived, OPS officers met the truckers, showed them where to park and took steps to allow them to store provisions. For the first week or so, Lich and Barber worked closely with the cops to keep emergency routes open and relations cordial. This congenial situation eventually soured, however, as the protesters lingered.

Just over two weeks later, on February 14 the federal government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act based on the Liberal Cabinet’s assertion that the protest constituted a Canada-wide “public order emergency” that could not be dealt with under existing laws and which involved threats of “serious violence against persons or property.” This essentially criminalized the Freedom Convey and all its supporters. Riot police then moved to physically clear the protest area, and 196 protesters in the immediate area were arrested. Another 76 individuals were arrested elsewhere in Canada at around the same time for attending other protests, including blockades at three border crossings in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

Crushing the “insurrection”: Initially accommodated by the Ottawa Police Service, the Freedom Convoy protest was later deemed a national “public order emergency”. Shown at top left, police circulate throughout the protest on February 9; top right, police hand out notices to protesters on February 17; at bottom, police confront and arrest protesters on February 18. (Sources of photos: (top left) The Canadian Press Images/Lars Hagberg; (top right) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang; (bottom left and right) Michel Elzo/Shutterstock)

The federal Liberals also bullied Canada’s chartered banks into freezing the bank accounts of many people connected to the protest. Lich and Barber had their personal finances locked and both were later arrested. Lich’s single, initial charge was for “counselling to commit the offence of mischief”; Barber was charged with counselling mischief, as well as obstruction and ignoring a court order. While half-a-dozen other charges were later added to the pair’s alleged offences, mischief was the common thread that connected them to the vast majority of other protesters arrested during the crackdown.

This prevalence of mischief seems a rather surprising fact. Amidst what was supposedly a massive and violent breakdown in public order, mischief – or counselling others to be mischievous – turned out to be the most serious crime the police could detect. In Ottawa there were no assaults, no murders, no guns or bombs, no fraud or extortion, no rioting and looting, no treason. Nothing, in other words, that might have signalled that an actual (as opposed to imagined or media-manufactured) insurrection was underway or imminent.

There was, however, one criminal act that provably did occur in Ottawa during the protests. Two men attempted to set an apartment building’s entryway alight and then sealed the doors shut. This appalling and dangerous act was immediately attributed by some to the protesters. Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, for example, stated it “clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of the protesters occupying our city.” Police soon established, however, that the fire had no link to anyone connected to the Freedom Convoy.

Legal Mischief

While the term conjures up images of a misbehaving toddler, section 430 of the Criminal Code of Canada defines mischief very broadly as the willful destruction of property or interference with others’ lawful enjoyment of their own property. It should not be taken too lightly, cautions Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal lawyer. “Yes, mischief can be something very minor, for example drawing graffiti on a public space, or chalking a sidewalk,” Spratt says in an interview. “But mischief can also include very serious offences, for example, occupying and blockading the national capital and inflicting extreme harm on its residents, businesses, and communities.”

As an indictable offence, mischief carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Since lawyers for Lich and Barber readily admit that mischief occurred during the protest, Spratt says the only legal issue to be decided in court is whether the pair were at fault “either as a party, a participant, an encourager, an abettor or a leader of the convoy who bears some responsibility for it.” In other words, Lich and Barber could be found guilty even if they didn’t commit any mischief themselves. That would, however, require crafting a rather elaborate theory to explain a rather mundane crime.

Not every legal observer is convinced mischief best fulfills the government’s claim that it was facing an incipient violent insurrection, as is required by the Emergencies Act. According to University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso, most mischief charges in Canada are actually quite minor and usually punished without any jail time. Reliance on what he, unlike Spratt, views as a rather insignificant crime as the means to punish Freedom Convoy protesters seems like “a safe, bureaucratic choice for the police,” Velloso explained to The Canadian Press, adding it is “a less demanding choice in terms of police work.”

Much ado about mischief: While Ottawa criminal lawyer Michael Spratt (left) says mischief can include “very serious charges”, University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso (right) observes that most mischief charges in Canada are minor and punished without any jail time. (Sources of photos: (left) Michael Spratt; (right) Errol McGihon/Saltwire)

Plus, it seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police. “The seriousness of the mischief during the protest was produced by lack of policing,” he asserted. This echoes the February 17, 2023 findings of the Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Justice Paul Rouleau, which also concluded that “policing failures” – in particular, inviting the truckers into the downtown area without any long-term plan to remove them – “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.”

In deciding whether the mischief charges faced by Lich and Barber are a big deal or not, it helps to consider the fate of other Freedom Convoy protesters faced with the same charge, many of whom have been represented by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). Steven Vardy, for example, was arrested while driving in downtown Ottawa after the Emergencies Act had been imposed and charged with obstruction. The charge of mischief was added after police discovered Vardy had narrated a video about the protest. The Crown dropped the obstruction charge before trial, and after two days in court the judge determined the mischief charge was equally untenable, and it too was dismissed.

Christine DeCaire, another JCCF client, was arrested while standing alone on Nicholas Street in downtown Ottawa as police moved to enforce the Emergencies Act on February 18. She was acquitted at trial, a result recently confirmed after the Crown appealed. JCCF client Ben Spicer was charged with mischief, obstruction and weapons offences after police grabbed him off the street during the protest and found a pocket knife and bear spray in his backpack. Spicer was then secretly recorded in a police van. After a six-day trial, all charges were dropped because he’d been arrested unlawfully. Evan Blackman, yet another JCCF client, was charged with mischief and obstruction, and had three bank accounts frozen. Drone footage later showed Blackman holding back protesters in order to de-escalate the situation. And just before he was arrested, he could be seen singing “O Canada”. The judge dismissed all charges after a one-day trial because of evidentiary weakness; the Crown is appealing.

Feeling mischievous: Police arrested 196 protesters in Ottawa after the Emergencies Act’s invocation, charging many with mischief and obstruction. Most had their charges later dropped or were found not guilty at trial, with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms playing a key role in these successful defences. (Source of photoThe Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Not every mischief case has collapsed in calamitous fashion, however. Publicity-seeking protester Tyson “Freedom George” Billings, who was not represented by the JCCF and had no direct link to Lich or Barber, pleaded guilty to counselling others to commit mischief. The other charges against him were dropped and he was sentenced to time served, about four months. And Pat King, who also garnered ample attention during the protest, is still awaiting the verdict of his mischief trial, which lasted three weeks. King and Billings were notable for their confrontational and often uncooperative relationship with the police during the protest, in sharp contrast with Lich and, for the most part, Barber.

Another exception to the raft of failed cases is the fate of the so-called “Coutts Four”. Separately from the Ottawa protest, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Chris Lysak and Jerry Morin were among the most hard-line of hundreds of participants at a tense, weeks-long standoff at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. On February 15 the four were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers as well as other weapons and mischief offences, upon which the whole protest disintegrated. Meanwhile, up to 100 other protesters at the site were charged with provincial regulatory offences.

Mischief ignored: The “Coutts Four” – (left to right) Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin and Christopher Lysak – were found guilty of serious crimes arising from a tense blockade at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. While Olienick and Carbert were also found guilty of mischief, their six-month sentences for this crime are to be served concurrently with their other, longer sentences. (Source of montage: CBC)

This past February, Lysak pled guilty to possession of a weapon in an unauthorized place and Morin pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms – clearly serious offences, but a vast reduction from the potential life sentences they faced. Both were sentenced to time served. More recently, Olienick and Carbert each received sentences of six-and-a-half years for various weapons offences. As for their mischief charges, each received an additional six-month sentence to be served concurrently with the other, more serious convictions. Finally, an Alberta law firm recently announced that of nearly 50 clients facing provincial charges for participating in the Coutts border protest, all either had their cases dropped or resolved for a nominal fine of $1 each.

At this point, Lich and Barber appear to be the only remaining major participants from the entire national saga who are still available to punish.

“Prosecutorial Vendetta”

While outcomes have varied, a clear pattern emerges from a survey of mischief charges laid during the Emergencies Act. Most have been dismissed or returned with a not guilty verdict after only a few days in court. A few – such as Billings’ guilty plea – have resulted in a minor sentence befitting the minor character of the crime itself. For Olienick and Carbert, their guilty verdicts for mischief had no impact on their overall jail time; they faced much more serious charges, and their mischief was essentially ignored. And the mischief trial for Pat King, who is still awaiting his verdict, was completed in three weeks.

By comparison, the trial of Lich and Barber stretched into a 13-month epic, comprising 45 trial days. All for a collection of rather modest mischief and obstruction charges. Why would that be?

The answer, according to Ari Goldkind, a high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer, lies in the exact thing Wetscher tried so hard to wave away during her concluding statement: politics. “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,” Goldkind states emphatically in an interview. For the Trudeau government to justify its suspension of Canadians’ civil liberties through the Emergencies Act requires an identifiable villain or two. Lich and Barber fit that bill. The length and unprecedented vigour with which the Crown has pursued the pair – Lich especially – as well as the manner in which the trial has dragged on, argues Goldkind, suggest there’s a “prosecutorial vendetta” against them.

“Prosecutorial vendetta”: Referring to Lich and Barber, high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind says, “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial.” (Source of photo: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Lich herself arrived in Ottawa, the diminutive, then-49-year-old Métis grandmother quickly became the public “face” of the protest. At a February 3 press conference, for example, she was introduced as “the spark that lit this fire and the leader of this organization.” And while she claims in her book Hold the Line: My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy that such a description “wasn’t accurate,” she nonetheless admits she filled a necessary role. “I guess I found a talent I didn’t know I had before,” she writes, speculating that her time spent on stage with her band might have prepared her for all the attention. “But I mostly feel like it was guided by God,” she adds.

While the Freedom Convoy was essentially ungovernable, comprised as it was of many disparate groups and publicity-seeking, independent-minded individuals, Lich tried her best to put her own calm and reasonable stamp on the proceedings. Throughout the protest, Lich’s efforts were observably peaceful and without any apparent mal intent. One of her first acts was to set up an independent group of accountants to handle the flood of donations financing the protest to prevent any suggestion of financial impropriety. In her dealings with the police, she always tried to find common ground – a fact readily acknowledged by police witnesses during the trial. Sergeant Jordan Blonde of the OPS protest liaison team, for example, noted in his testimony that Lich was always “polite” in his dealings with her, and that the protest itself was comprised of “many different groups and factions… [and] unattached people” who were not “aligned with anybody.”

In her own interactions with the protesters, over whom she had no real control, Lich repeatedly stressed the protest’s peaceful nature and worked tirelessly to rid the movement of disreputable or hateful characters. She even cobbled together a deal with Ottawa mayor Watson to move some trucks out of the downtown area; ironically, that deal went into effect on the same day as the Emergencies Act was invoked. As her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon observed in a brief courthouse lobby interview, “She is a genuine, very pleasant person, and almost a throwback to the peace-and-love days. She was preaching all along that ‘we only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.’”

“A throwback to the peace-and-love days”: According to her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon (at left centre, in barrister’s robe), Lich was a source of calm and grace throughout the protest and “only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.” (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Perhaps it’s this “peace-and-love” attitude that has provoked such spite towards her. Whatever the reason, the official animosity has been painfully obvious. While the physically-imposing Barber was released on bail less than 48-hours after his arrest, Lich spent 18 days awaiting bail. At her first bail hearing, Ontario Justice Julie Bourgeois claimed Lich posed such a risk to the “physical, mental and financial health and well-being” of the people of Ottawa that she denied her application outright. Only after a bail review hearing several weeks later was Lich finally released pending trial. As Goldkind points out, many extremely violent and/or repeat offenders in Canada spend no time at all in jail following their arrest. This, as many critics observe, is the result of the Liberals’ 2019 bail reform package widely derided as a “catch-and-release” policy; it apparently doesn’t apply to Lich.

When she was finally set free, Lich returned to Alberta saddled with a long list of bail conditions, including that she neither publicly support the protest nor have any contact with other protest organizers unless a lawyer is present. “After weeks of fighting for Canadians’ right[s] and freedoms, I was losing so many of mine,” she laments in Hold the Line. It was because of these efforts, however, that in June 2022 it was announced that Lich had been awarded the annual George Jonas Freedom Award, sponsored by the JCCF. Naturally enough she wanted to go to Toronto to accept the honour in person. But before she could, the Crown came after her yet again.

At a court hearing necessitated by the award (since her bail conditions also banned her from setting foot in Ontario), Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee argued that simply by accepting the honour, Lich had violated the terms of her bail and should be locked up again. Such an absurdity was quickly brushed aside by the presiding judge, who ruled she could travel to Ontario to attend the celebration, provided she abided by the remainder of her bail restrictions. While there, however, Lich was photographed standing beside another convoy participant, Tom Marrazzo.

The fateful photo: When she went to Toronto to accept the 2022 George Jonas Freedom Award at a gala presentation, Lich was photographed beside fellow protester Tom Marrazzo (second from right) with lawyers standing just off-camera. This led to a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest and another 31 days in jail. (Source of photo: CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

As she recalls in her book, “Lawyers were standing just outside the frame” when the picture was snapped, in fulfilment of her bail conditions. No matter. When the lawyer-less picture began circulating on social media after she’d returned home, Karimjee issued a Canada-wide arrest warrant in her name. Two homicide detectives were then dispatched from Ottawa to pick Lich up in Medicine Hat; the two burly detectives slapped her in leg shackles for the trip to the Calgary airport. You can’t be too careful with grandmothers.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict. To this request, Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman asked Karimjee if he could name a single mischief case in Canada that had resulted in a 10-year sentence. When Karimjee demurred, Goodman set Lich free once more.

In his ruling, Goodman offered his own expert opinion on the fate awaiting Lich. She “is charged with mischief and obstructing police-related offences, not sedition or inciting a riot,” the judge pointed out. “It is highly unlikely that this 49-year-old accused, with no prior criminal record and questions regarding her direct participation in the overall protests…would face a potentially lengthy term of imprisonment.”

Even if she’s found guilty, Goodman concluded, she’ll probably be sentenced to no more than time already served. All told, that amounts to 49 nights in jail. Says Goldkind: “That’s 49 nights longer in jail than someone who is caught driving three-times over the legal [alcohol] limit would likely face.” Had Karimjee gotten his way, however, she’d still be in jail – a term of 28 months and counting.

In an effort to explain the Crown’s extreme hostility towards her, Lich reveals in her book that prosecutor Karimjee has donated over $17,000 to the federal Liberal Party since 2013 and that his generosity has merited an invitation to at least one “donor appreciation” event with Trudeau himself. Similarly, Bourgeois, the judge who initially denied Lich bail, was once a Liberal candidate in an Ottawa-area riding during the 2011 federal election. In her journey through the courts to that point – a case the Crown argues is not political in any way – it was Karimjee and Bourgeoise, both with longstanding and very public Liberal sympathies, who had been the gatekeepers of a legal system intent on holding her to account for leading a massive political protest against the Liberal government. As Lich writes, “I didn’t stand a chance.”

“I didn’t stand a chance”: According to Lich’s book Hold the Line, Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee (top right) made substantial donations to the Liberal Party of Canada beginning in 2013, while the judge in her initial bail hearing, Justice Julie Bourgeois (bottom right), ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2011 federal election. (Sources of photo: (top right) True North; (bottom right) juliebourgeoisgpr/YouTube)

Part II of “Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber” will appear on November 5.

Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practicing lawyer in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld.

Continue Reading

Trending

X