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Questions linger after Coutts verdict

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Chris Carbert and Anthony Olienick Courtesy Bridge City News/YouTube

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Ray McGinnis

The Coutts trial may be over, but the questions it raises about justice and overreach continue.

A jury in the trial of Chris Carbert and Anthony “Tony” Olienick rendered a NOT GUILTY verdict on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder of police officers. Known as the Coutts Two, Carbert and Olienick’s trial lasted from June 6 to August 2, 2024. After two and a half days of deliberations, the jury also found the pair GUILTY of possession of weapons for a dangerous purpose, and mischief over $5,000. Olienick was also found GUILTY of possession of explosives for a dangerous purpose.

On February 13, 2022, Olienick was arrested outside Smuggler’s Saloon. Early on February 14, 2022, Chris Carbert was awakened from his sleep in a trailer by police loudspeaker.

Two Co-Accused Had All Charges Dropped in February

Conspiracy, possession of weapons, and mischief charges were also laid against Chris Lysak and Jerry Morin. Carbert, Olienick, Lysak and Morin, were dubbed the Coutts Four.

Lysak was arrested in Coutts late on February 13, 2022. Morin was arrested heading west of Calgary on Hwy. 22. He would work for a rancher near Priddis, a three-hour drive from Coutts. Lysak and Morin had all the original charges in the indictment dropped on Feb 6th, 2024.

Lysak pleaded to improper storage of a firearm. That charge typically results in a minor fine, not two years behind bars. Morin pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms, not to trafficking firearms. Two years in custody — including solitary confinement and being witness to brutality between prisoners — had taken its toll.

Tony Olienick’s lawyer, Marilyn Burns, told this reporter, Morin was not guilty of the new charge to which he plead. But this was the plea deal the Crown would agree to. Morin and Lysak were released after 723 days behind bars.

Carbert and Olienick maintained their innocence. However, pre-trial deliberations in court dribbled out for over a year before the trial itself.

The Accused Were Unarmed
None of the original Coutts Four — Carbert, Olienick, Lysak or Morin — were armed when arrested. None had a criminal record. Three of the four are fathers with children. Before his arrest, Lethbridge resident Chris Carbert was a self-employed fisherman who also ran a landscaping and fencing business with nine employees.

Years before his arrest, Tony Olienick took part of the clean-up in High River, Alberta, after the 2013 floods. The self-employed gravel truck owner got contract work at a stone quarry.

Coutts Charges Cited to Invoke Emergencies Act

At the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry in November 2022, several senior cabinet and government officials cited events in Coutts as one of the triggers for invoking the Emergencies [War Measures] Act on February 14, 2022. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland testified “we heard from the RCMP Commissioner about concerns that there were serious weapons in Coutts . . . that really raised the stakes in terms of my degree of concern about what could be happening.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated, “the occupation at Coutts seemed to be emboldened.”

Coutts Mayor, Jimmy Willett described the protesters as “Domestic Terrorists.” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino testified “the situation was combustible… individuals… involved in Coutts were prepared to go down with a fight that could lead to the loss of life, . . . would have triggered other events across the country.”

The Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, pointed to the “seriousness” and “scale” of the “illegal activity,” “the quantity of weapons and ammunition discovered by the RCMP… contemplated by people at Coutts.” This confirmed her view that these people were insurrectionists, bent on “overthrowing the government.”

Yet, no bodycam footage and no recording entered as evidence in the trial substantiated claims by RCMP that Carbert or Olienick plotted violence against police. In January 2024, a federal court ruled the invocation of the Emergencies Act was “unconstitutional.” The August 2 not guilty verdict for conspiracy to commit murder adds to the perception of government overreaction to the protests.

A Surprise from the Crown
In its closing words to the jury, the Crown suddenly alleged there was a hand-off of weapons on February 11, 2022.

The Crown should provide full disclosure to the defence before the trial concludes so allegations can be tested in court. Never mind. This last-minute allegation may have swayed the jury to find the defendants guilty of the possession of firearms charge and Olienick of possession of an explosive device for a dangerous purpose.

Sentencing and bail hearings were scheduled from August 26 to 30. The week of September 9, the judge at the Coutts Two trial will hand down sentences for both of the accused given their combination of i) not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder verdict by the jury and ii) guilty verdicts for possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and mischief, and for Olienick a separate guilty verdict for possession of an explosive for a dangerous purpose.

By then, the pair will have been in custody for 935 days.

This commentary is first of a three part series. Read part two here, and three here.

Ray McGinnis is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His forthcoming book is Unjustified: The Emergencies Act and the Inquiry that Got It Wrong

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University of Colorado will pay $10 million to staff, students for trying to force them to take COVID shots

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine caused ‘life-altering damage’ to Catholics and other religious groups by denying them exemptions to its COVID shot mandate, and now the school must pay a hefty settlement.

The University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine must pay more than $10.3 million to 18 plaintiffs it attempted to force into taking COVID-19 shots despite religious objections, in a settlement announced by the religious liberty law firm the Thomas More Society.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in April 2021, the University of Colorado (UC) announced its requirement that all staff and students receive COVID jabs, leaving specific policy details to individual campuses. On September 1, 2021, it enforced an updated policy stating that “religious exemption may be submitted based on a person’s religious belief whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations,” but required not only a written explanation why one’s “sincerely held religious belief, practice of observance prevents them” from taking the jabs, but also whether they “had an influenza or other vaccine in the past.”

On September 24, the policy was revised to stating that “religious accommodation may be granted based on an employee’s religious beliefs,” but “will not be granted if the accommodation would unduly burden the health and safety of other Individuals, patients, or the campus community.”

In practice, the school denied religious exemptions to Catholic, Buddhist, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, Protestant, and other applicants, most represented by Thomas More in a lawsuit contending that administrators “rejected any application for a religious exemption unless an applicant could convince the Administration that her religion ‘teaches (them) and all other adherents that immunizations are forbidden under all circumstances.’”

The UC system dropped the mandate in May 2023, but the harm had been done to those denied exemptions while it was in effect, including unpaid leave, eventual firing, being forced into remote work, and pay cuts.

In May 2024, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the school for denying the accommodations. Writing for the majority, Judge Allison Eid found that a “government employer may not punish some employees, but not others, for the same activity, due only to differences in the employee’s religious beliefs.”

Now, Thomas More announces that year-long settlement negotiations have finally secured the aforementioned hefty settlement for their clients, covering damages, tuition costs, and attorney’s fees. It also ensured the UC will agree to allow and consider religious accommodation requests on an equal basis to medical exemption requests and abstain from probing the validity of applicants’ religious beliefs in the future.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction can make up for the life-altering damage Chancellor Elliman and Anschutz inflicted on the plaintiffs and so many others throughout this case, who felt forced to succumb to a manifestly irrational mandate,” declared senior Thomas More attorney Michael McHale. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith during what Justice Gorsuch has rightly declared one of ‘the greatest intrusion[s] on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’ We are confident our clients’ long-overdue victory indeed confirms, despite the tyrannical efforts of many, that our shared constitutional right to religious liberty endures.”

On top of the numerous serious adverse medical events that have been linked to the COVID shots and their demonstrated ineffectiveness at reducing symptoms or transmission of the virus, many religious and pro-life Americans also object to the shots on moral grounds, due to the ethics of how they were developed.

Catholic World Report notes that similarly large sums have been won in other high-profile lawsuits against COVID shot mandates, including $10.3 million to more than 500 NorthShore University HealthSystem employees in 2022 and $12.7 million to a Catholic Michigander fired by Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2024.

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The dangers of mRNA vaccines explained by Dr. John Campbell

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From the YouTube channel of Dr John Campbell

There aren’t many people as good at explaining complex medical situations at Dr. John Campbell.  That’s probably because this British Health Researcher spent his career teaching medicine to nurses.

Over the last number of years, Campbell has garnered an audience of millions of regular people who want to understand various aspects of the world of medical treatment.

In this important video Campbell explains how the new mRNA platform of vaccines can cause very serious health outcomes.

Dr. Campbell’s notes for this video:

Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic https://www.researchgate.net/publicat… Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections, which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90%) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020. Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021, but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections. The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia. Unlike Australia, where assessing the statistical impact of COVID injections on excess deaths is relatively straightforward, UK excess deaths were closely associated with the use of Midazolam and other medical intervention. The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by euthanasia deaths from Midazolam and also, likely caused by COVID injections, but their relative impacts are difficult to measure from the data, due to causal proximity of euthanasia. Global investigations of COVID-19 epidemiology, based only on the relative impacts of COVID disease and vaccination, may be inaccurate, due to the neglect of significant confounding factors in some countries. Graphs April 2020, 98.8% increase 43,796 January 2021, 29.2% increase 16,546 Therefore covid is very dangerous, This interpretation, which is disputable, justified politically the declaration of emergency and all public health measures, including masking, lockdowns, etc. Excess deaths and erroneous conclusions 2020, 76,000 2021, 54,000 2022, 45,000 This evidence of “vaccine effectiveness” was illusory, due to incorrect attribution of the 2020 death spike. PS Despite advances in modern information technology, the accuracy of data collection has not advanced in the United Kingdom for over 150 years, because the same problems of erroneous data entry found then are still found now in the COVID pandemic, not only in the UK but all over the world. We have independently discovered the same UK data problem and solution for assessing COVID-19 vaccination as Alfred Russel Wallace had 150 years ago in investigating the consequences of Vaccination Acts starting in 1840 on smallpox: The Alfred Russel Wallace as used by Wilson Sy “Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics, depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients, we turn to the only really important evidence, those ‘masses of national experience’…” https://archive.org/details/b21356336… Alfred Russel Wallace, 1880s–1890s 1840 Vaccination Act Provided free smallpox vaccination to the poor Banned variolation Vaccination compulsory in 1853, 1867 Why his interest? C 1885 The Leicester Anti-Vaccination demonstrations (1885) Growing public resistance to compulsory vaccination Wallace’s increasing involvement in social reform and statistical arguments Statistical critique of vaccination Government data on: Smallpox mortality trends before and after compulsory vaccination Case mortality rates Vaccination vs. sanitation effects Mortality trends before and after each Act, 1853 and 1867 “Forty-Five Years of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination to Be Both Useless and Dangerous” (1885) “Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime” (1898) Contributions to the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1890–1896) Wallace argued: Declining smallpox mortality was due to improved sanitation, not vaccination Official statistics were misinterpreted or biased Compulsory vaccination was unjust Re-vaccination did not reliably prevent outbreaks These views were strongly disputed, then and now. Wallace had a strong distrust of medical authority He and believed in: Statistical reasoning Social reform Opposition to coercive government measures The primacy of environmental and sanitary conditions in health

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