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COVID-19

Here’s how we know COVID-19 was decades in the making

Published

35 minute read

By LifeSiteNews

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

The video below features a lecture David E. Martin, Ph.D., gave in Dornach, Switzerland, in late October 2023. Martin is a national intelligence analyst and founder of IQ100 Index, which developed linguistic genomics, a platform capable of determining the intent of communications.

This technology has allowed Martin to scan and review millions of patents, resulting in a paper trail that conclusively proves SARS-CoV-2 is a man-made bioweapon that has been in the works for 58 years.

Unambiguous admission of a premeditated plandemic

As he is now in the habit of doing, Martin opens his lecture with a quote by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. During a March 27, 2015, forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events, Daszak noted that unless an infectious disease crisis is at an emergency threshold, it tends to be ignored.

“To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs (medical countermeasures) such as a pan-influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine,” Daszak said, adding:

“A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of the process.”

Martin comments:

What felonies did Daszak admit to in 2015?

Martin then goes on to explain how, in that quote from 2015, Daszak admitted to several different felonies. In summary:

  • “To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis… ” — Daszak is not speaking of expanding or benefiting public health here. He’s also not referring to an actual health crisis that was taking place when the comment was made.
    No, according to Martin, “the crisis was that there was a reduction in funding of biological weapons programs sponsored by the World Health Organization. The crisis was not a health crisis. It was a funding crisis for the people who were running out of money for their bioweapons programs. Those are two crimes.”
  • “A key driver is the media, and the economics will follow the hype.” — This, according to Martin, is an admission of two additional crimes. “Hype” refers to psychological terror. In other words, funding will follow provided the psychological terror is great enough, and he admits the media will be used to push that fear porn.
    The second felony is economic conspiracy, because “economics that follow hype is not informed consent,” Martin notes. “That’s not willing buyer, willing seller, informed of all the facts.” Using psychological terror to secure funding implies “an intent to defraud.”
    Martin explains: “Under Crown Law we call it ‘fraudulent conveyance’ when you don’t inform the counterparty of the risks associated with a contract… Why is this important?
    The reason why fraudulent conveyance is such an important principle in the law, is… [because] the fraud-perpetrating party is required under the law to not just recompense the damage.
    Their legal obligation is to return the damaged party to their pre-damaged state. It’s not, ‘We’re going to give you a couple bucks for your pain and suffering. No, you are legally required to return the condition to the pre-damage state.”
    So, to reiterate, financial compensation is not the legal standard when it comes to fraudulent conveyance. The party that engaged in the fraud is legally required to make the defrauded whole again. And why is that important? Because “we’re not even asking for what we should ask for,” Martin says.
    Is there a dollar amount that can cure the myocarditis you suffered after the shot? Or the turbo cancer that’s killing your mother? Or the blood clots that killed your father? “If we followed the law, we would actually recommend, not a financial compensation, we would recommend a return to the pre-damaged state,” Martin says.
  • “We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues.” — What are “the real issues”? To get investors to respond with funding, which they will do if they can “see profit at the end of the process.” In other words, investors will open their pocketbooks if they can confirm that psychological terror makes people line up to receive an injection.

Why do we need a vaccine for an eradicated infection?

Martin goes on to note that a Pan-Coronavirus Vaccine Program was actually publicly announced  during the moratorium on gain of function on coronaviruses in the United States, which was in place from 2014 until 2017.

“That gain of function moratorium was going on while we were announcing a global plan of global terrorism, a pan-coronavirus vaccine, which, by the way, the World Health Organization… declared eradicated a year earlier,” Martin says.

“How do we need a vaccine for an eradicated disease, during a gain of function moratorium, when there’s theoretically no chance that we could have a reason to need a vaccine for a thing that doesn’t exist? Well, because we were making it – professor Baric. We were hyping it – Peter Daszak… And we were going to hijack liberty with it.”

READ: Florida surgeon general asks FDA for answers after study allegedly finds DNA fragments in COVID shots

The 58-year timeline of SARS-CoV-2

As explained by Martin, the virus called “coronavirus” was first described in 1965. Two years later, the U.S. and U.K. launched an exchange program where healthy British military personnel were infected with coronavirus pathogens from the U.S. – “as part of our biological weapons program.”

In 1992, Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, took a pathogen that used to infect the gut and lungs and altered it with a chimera to make it infect the heart, causing cardiomyopathy.

“Pause and think about what I just said,” Martin says. “What goes on in the head of a person who says, ‘This was a little glitch in my tummy, it was a little sniffle in my nose. Let’s see if we can make it hit hearts and… create cardiomyopathy,’ one of the most lethal heart inflammations possible.”

In November 2000, Pfizer patented its first spike protein vaccine. So, Operation Warp Speed really didn’t produce a spike protein vaccine in a few months. No, that research had been going on since late 2000. So, the COVID shots were 19 years in the making by the time they were rolled out.

The problem is that during those 19 years, none of the coronavirus vaccines worked. “Every single trial, from November of 2000 until [2019], had killed all of the animals into which the experimental injections were placed,” Martin says.

Despite that, the University of California San Francisco’s institutional review board was told, in the summer of 2020, that the clinical trials for the coronavirus vaccine were a “straight to humans protocol.” In other words, it didn’t need to go through preliminary animal research.

As noted by Martin, it would be quite inconvenient to have safety data showing it kills animals. No one would line up for a shot like that, no matter how many free cheeseburgers you throw at them.

How can we know that SARS was a weapon?

While all of that is disturbing enough, there’s more. Martin continues:

You kind of can’t make this egregious level of a crime up unless you realize that behind this, there must be another crime. Each one of these, in and of themselves, is horrific. But the sum of them becomes much, much, much more problematic.

Let’s go ahead and jump to the wonderful creation of the patent that was filed in 2002, which is actually the reason why I am done with everybody who ask the question ‘Was there a novel virus; was there novel disease?’ Let’s stipulate, with the facts, that there were neither.

There’s not a novel virus. There was a variety of biological weapons designed off the back of the patent that was filed in 2002, which was the ‘infectious replication-defective clone of coronavirus.’

Now let’s slow down and answer the question, what does that phrase mean? Infectious replication-defective. ‘Infectious’ means we want to target a cell in the body to make sure the thing that we’re injecting goes into the cell…

‘Replication-defective’ means we want the information that we inject to infect that cell, but not replicate and spread to others, which means that the bioweapon itself was engineered as a weapon to hit a target, but not proliferate.

That’s what the patented technology is, which is the reason why, when we had SARS 1.0 in 2002 and 2003… we were [told there would be] dead people everywhere. [But] as hard as we tried to make it into a pandemic… we [could] only kick 900 people off the mountain. That was the global pandemic. Why? Because the weapon worked.

If you exposed somebody to the toxic agent, they died. But they didn’t spread it to others, which is the reason why we did not have the transmission of SARS 1.0, because you can’t transmit a thing that’s designed not to replicate.

But worse still: What is the definition of a virus?… A virus is a replicating protein sequence. Guess what this isn’t? Replication-defective means we took the virus out of a virus. It was not a replicating device. It was in fact a weapon.

Now, I’ve got tons of people who go, ‘Dave, you’re crossing the line, don’t say it’s a weapon. It’s not a weapon… You offend people who kill people when you call it a weapon.’ Well, guess what, if you’re offended, I don’t care, because I didn’t call it a weapon – the guy who built it called it a weapon.

READ: Citizen-led inquiry calls for ‘immediate halt’ to COVID vaccine use in Canada

mRNA Spike protein is a biological warfare agent

Indeed, mRNA spike protein was publicly described as a bioweapon 18 years ago. In 2005, at a conference hosted by DARPA and the Mitre Corporation in the U.S., the mRNA spike protein was hailed as a “biological warfare-enabling technology.” Does that sound like it has any public health-related applications? No, as Martin insists, “biological warfare-enabling technology” means it’s a biological warfare agent.

“So, I’m not the one saying that it’s a biological weapon. I’m not the one saying it’s biological warfare,” Martin says.

The perpetrator called it that in 2005, and was rewarded with a dual entry budget, where… the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, received money from Anthony Fauci’s NIAID/NIH budget, and exactly at the same time… Fauci had a second checkbook [that] came from the Department of Defense pandemic preparedness program. And guess what that was? An equal matching noncompetition grant…

In Europe, that’s a violation of anti-competition laws. You’re not allowed to double down on a public grant without competition or transparency, saying that this agency is going to give you $10 million… and [a second] one is going to give you $10 million… because [the first] one gave you $10 million.

Not because it was fair, not because it was open, not because it was transparent, not because there was actually grant competition, but by virtue of the determination of one side, the other side facto matched the money. And that started in 2005, not in 2019.

Big Pharma owns all North Carolina universities

Over the past two years, a lot of information has come out exposing how Daszak funneled millions of research dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China for gain of function research on coronaviruses. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. According to Martin, at least $141 million went to the U.S. bioweapons program led by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Martin continues:

I have been the most ardent advocate for shaming the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for a very good reason… and the reason is because in 1984, the state of North Carolina, not just the university, sold itself to… GlaxoSmithKline and the Wellcome companies.

The reason why you’ve heard the term ‘Research Triangle Institute’ or ‘Research Triangle Park’ – which is University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University – is because the state of North Carolina sold its universities to GlaxoSmithKline Wellcome, and they did it because of AZT.

AZT was on patent, and we needed a state in the United States to be ground zero, to make sure that AZT became the drug of choice for the treatment of HIV. So in 1984, we invent HIV, conveniently for the purpose of making sure we have one treatment: AZT.

Here’s the interesting little fact that very few people know. If you go back and look at the videos of Anthony Fauci in 1985 and 1986… he’s talking about [getting] a vaccine for HIV. But he suddenly got a knock on the door from GlaxoSmithKline going, ‘Hey Mr. Fauci, don’t start that project until the patent on AZT runs out.’

I’m not making this up. It’s actually videos that you can see. And so, mysteriously, courtesy of the Wellcome AZT protest, from 1991 to 1996, the world was told that the only treatment for HIV was AZT, and as such, the patent and the rest of the patent life on AZT could expire, so that GlaxoSmithKline Wellcome could get all of the money for the patented technology for a thing that was killing patients that allegedly had HIV.

Murder for hire. North Carolina sold the state so that could happen. Conveniently, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) decided that UNC Chapel Hill was its go-to institution, while AZT was in its monopoly run, to begin the process of doing HIV vaccine research…

So, ‘91 to ‘96 is the AZT cover story. Underneath that you have Ralph Baric genetically modifying and making chimeras of this coronavirus thing to create an HIV vaccine, which is going to conveniently roll out in 1997, as the patent on AZT expires.

[This] is the reason why you need to figure out how to get the gastrointestinal and flu problem to become a heart problem: Because you need to get that package, that little envelope around what we call coronavirus… to deliver the HIV vaccine.

So all of the funding for the HIV vaccine that was going to this program was actually going to use coronavirus as the packet in which the HIV vaccine was going to be delivered. That’s the model. [There are] hundreds of papers on this.

And, this is why this question of… is there HIV fragments somewhere in [the COVID shots]? The answer is, of course there is. It was designed into it. And it was designed into it, not a couple of years ago, not by Moderna, not by BioNtech. This was designed in many, many years earlier.

Not surprisingly, from ‘96 to ’99, Ralph Baric begins the weaponization of this allegedly synthetic coronavirus envelope to become a vaccine vector. 1999 comes along, and lo and behold, Baric and Fauci create what I affectionately call FrankenCoV.

What’s that? That is the monster, that’s the chimera. That’s the idea that we can change surface glycans, we can change surface spike proteins, we can change surface oligomerization, we can do all kinds of things to modify this thing.

So we can actually have this… package shell, the outer edge of coronavirus, we can allow that to be the carrier of getting anything we want into any cell we want. Which is the reason why the 2002 patent becomes interesting.

NIAID funded research to increase human pathogenicity

Next, Martin shows a letter, dated October 21, 2014, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, declaring that Baric’s grant I1077810-02 had been deemed subject to the moratorium on gain of function research involving coronaviruses. However, at the bottom of the page 1, it also states that:

As this grant is already funded, the pause is voluntary and you can continue to conduct the applicable GOF [gain of function] research until the end of the currently active budget period.

READ: New Zealand whistleblower who leaked data linking COVID jabs to excess deaths faces 7 years in prison

In other words, the NIAID gave Baric a free pass to decide whether he wanted to abide by the moratorium or not. What’s more, the grant actually didn’t have a termination date, because it was a noncompetitive, perpetually funded grant. So, Baric was given a free pass to conduct gain of function research indefinitely.

And what was this grant for? To increase the “human pathogenesis” of coronavirus in vivo, meaning inside the body. “Two billion people are going to be incapacitated or killed – because of this letter,” Martin says.

Who can be held accountable?

Alright. So, why can’t we just prosecute Baric, Fauci, and whomever else and be done with it? Because this research project was placed under the World Health Organization’s GAVI Vaccine Alliance, and under Article 5, Section 13 of the WHO’s charter, they cannot be investigated or prosecuted for any crimes committed. GAVI, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, also has diplomatic immunity and cannot be investigated by local authorities there either.

“They knew that if they put the project under the WHO, it was shielded from all criminal investigation and all criminal liability – forever,” Martin says.

But that’s not all. 2010 to 2020 was declared The Decade of Vaccines. GAVI devised a global vaccine action plan that included global acceptance of a “universal influenza-coronavirus vaccine” by 2020, to protect against “accidental or intentional release” of a respiratory pathogen. As noted by Martin, “release” is “an active, intent-filled word. It is not an ‘oops’ accident.”

Recall, the same person who said they needed to create media hype to create sustained funding, Daszak, was appointed to lead the WHO’s investigation into the lab leak theory. Not surprisingly, his team decided there was no evidence to support the lab leak theory and it was probably a case of zoonotic transference after all.

A crime that keeps going and going

Martin also stresses that this crime is not just about the creation of COVID. It’s a crime that keeps going and going. He explains how children were murdered in 2011 clinical trials for a malaria vaccine. Sixty-six of the children in the vaccine group suffered serious and/or fatal adverse events, as did 28 in the control group. However, controls were not given saline, but rather a cocktail of other vaccines.

When people attempted to hold the clinical trials agents accountable for their actions, guess what they referred to? They referred to Article [5 Section] 13 of their representative as members [of the WHO, which gives them] ‘immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure personal baggage and respect to words spoken or written and all acts done by them in their official capacity, immunity from legal process of every kind.’

That’s in the charter of what we call the World Health Organization. That ladies and gentlemen is the mafia, and we should stop pretending it’s something else.

It is an embarrassment to the Swiss people. It is embarrassment to the Swiss government that the World Health Organization exists in this place. Because the Swiss have enabled the organized crime of the World Health Organization, and they have enabled it so that real individuals can murder children under the age of three months…

We the People cannot allow this to happen. We’re talking about the [WHO pandemic] treaty… [when] we should be talking about the World Health Organization itself, not the treaty. And as long as Section 13 of Article 5 remains in the charter, I don’t care what treaties they pass, it doesn’t matter, because the institution is corrupt at its core, and you can’t fix that. That is a license to kill.

Martin also provides a quick review of the history of how the WHO came to be, and how, in 1952, then-director-general of the WHO, Brock Chisholm, declared that “the role of the WHO is population control.”

Aside from being in charge of population control, the WHO is a marketing and distribution arm for private sector interests that sponsor it (Bill Gates being a primary one), while simultaneously providing them with immunity from prosecution.

According to Martin, Gates various organizations provide so much money to the WHO that “By every definition of the law, [the WHO] is a wholly owned subsidiary.”

Timeline

Toward the end of his speech, Martin summarizes some of the key items on the timeline of the conspiracy to commit global genocide:

  • In 2002, U.S. scientists developed the weapon.
  • In 2003, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention patented the weapon in its first commercial deployment (SARS).
  • In 2005, mRNA spike protein was declared a biological “warfare-enabling” technology.
  • In 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published “SARS-Like W1V1-COV Poised for Human Emergence.” The W1V1-COV refers to the first COVID-like virus made at the WIV. In that article, they not only state that the virus is ready for release, but they also detailed the best ways to release it.
    At the bottom of the article, you also learn that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill impaneled two separate institutional review board reviews of this study, the first to review the ethics of the research and a second to review the ethics of violating the gain of function moratorium, which is unusual to say the least. As noted by Martin:

    You do not usually have an ethics board going ‘Well, should we do this? It’s probably a bad idea.’ And then somebody goes, ‘It’s illegal’… ‘OK, should we do the illegal thing?’ ‘Yeah, let’s go ahead do that. The guys over here said it was ethical to do the illegal thing to kill people.’ That happened and is published in this 2016 article.

  • September 18, 2019, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, jointly founded by the WHO and the World Bank, warned that “a rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen (whether naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released) poses additional preparedness requirements.”
    Furthermore, the “Progress indicator by September 2020” section specified the commitment by donors and member countries to finance and develop a universal influenza vaccine and other therapeutics.9

READ: Pentagon data shows heart failure spiked nearly 1,000% among pilots in 2022: whistleblower

“This is the admission by the World Health Organization that they are going to do a release of a respiratory pathogen,” Martin says, adding:

And, by the way, the reason why this is particularly important is they say ‘a lethal respiratory pathogen.’ They knew they were going to kill people. That’s why they use the word lethal…

This is the evidence that we can use in a criminal case to say, ‘This was not an accident. This was an actual premeditated act of lethality.’ They not only told you when it was going to happen. They told you the deadline for the outcome response. ‘We’re going to release the pathogen so that by September 2020, the world has accepted a universal vaccine.’ That is prima facia terrorism, collusion, racketeering, criminal conspiracy and… murder.

So that’s why we have the Wanted posters… [for] Peter Daszak… Ralph Baric… Jeremy Farrar… Chris Elias… Ghebreyesus… Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the World Health Organization, DARPA, the United Nations… Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation.

These individuals, in violation of racketeering, antitrust and anticompetition laws, colluded to create the largest act of global terrorism known to Earth and announced the plan to do it on September 18, 2019, with premeditation and with the intent to kill.

This was entirely a premeditated act. They told us it would happen in 2011. They announced the event horizon in 2019… Conspiring to commit acts of terror, restraint of trade, deceptive medical practices, price fixing, fraudulent conveyance. These are the crimes that the World Health Organization not only allowed to happen, but [it also] promoted these crimes and gave political cover for those crimes…

All-cause mortality in the ages of 18 to 55 is now 40% higher in the people that were injected with a biological weapon. That number is not going down. That number is going up in every jurisdiction. And here’s the saddest part about it. That number will continue to go up. If they [meet] their 2011 objective, that number will go up to 2 billion people.

The damage is done

Martin points out that even if they don’t unleash any other bioweapons, the desired death toll may still be achieved, because they used pseudouridine in the mRNA shots, which is causing “turbo cancers.”

Pseudouridine suppresses cancer-controlling agents and promotes oncogenic activity in the body, and this has been known since 2018, so its inclusion was hardly an accident.

The shots are also targeting reproduction, which is a key target if you want to depopulate. It’s not just infertility. Prostate, ovarian and uterine cancers make it more difficult to have sex, and hence more difficult to have children.

According to Martin, the evidence is clear. None of this is accidental. It’s a conspiracy, alright. But not a conspiracy theory in the dismissive sense. It’s a global conspiracy by identifiable agents who have, for nearly 60 years, plotted to commit, and profit from, the greatest genocide the world has ever seen, while hiding behind the false veneer of “public health.”

Reprinted with permission from Mercola.

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.

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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.

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