News Release from The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
TORONTO: The Justice Centre filed a lawsuit today in the Federal Court of Canada, on behalf of 11 Canadians either fined for not using the ArriveCAN and/or ordered to quarantine for 14 days after returning home from abroad. The Applicants involved in this legal challenge have received fines of up to $8,500 each and been forced to disclose private medical information via ArriveCAN. The legal challenge seeks to strike down the mandatory use of ArriveCAN and declare unconstitutional the 14-day quarantine requirements for Canadians who refuse to use ArriveCAN when returning home.
ArriveCan was initially implemented in April 2020 to force Canadian citizens returning home to submit quarantine plans due to Covid. It was mandated for air travellers November 21, 2020. In February 2021, the federal government mandated ArriveCan for all land travellers, while the US-Canada land crossing was still closed. After the Covid vaccine rollouts, travellers were required to upload their vaccination certificates onto the ArriveCAN app.
Mr. Matthew Leccese, one of the applicants, went to the United States for 25 minutes to pick up some parts for his vehicle. Upon his return, the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) demanded that he submit his vaccination certificate via ArriveCAN. Mr. Leccese refused because he had privacy concerns with ArriveCAN, but offered to present his vaccination certificate. CBSA refused to accept his paper certificate and issued him a ticket for $7,210 for not using ArriveCAN.
Mr. Alexander Macdonald, another applicant, attempted to cross the U.S. border in April 2022. He was refused entry by U.S. border agents and was allowed to return to Canada without issue. He tried to cross the U.S. border again in July 2022 and was again denied entry and returned to the Canadian side of the border. This time a CBSA agent ordered Mr. Macdonald to download ArriveCAN and submit to the 14-day quarantine despite never having set foot in the U.S.
Ms. Amanda Yates returned to Canada via a land crossing. Her husband used ArriveCAN on their behalf, but a glitch in the system sent them to secondary screening. She refused to disclose her vaccination status and was fined and required to quarantine for 14 days. Her husband did disclose his vaccination status, and was not required to quarantine, despite living in the same house with Ms. Yates.
A glitch with ArriveCAN sent an automated message to over 10,000 vaccinated Canadians, requiring them to quarantine for 14 days. It took the government 12 days to inform the affected individuals that the app had malfunctioned.
ArriveCAN continues to come under heavy criticism for creating massive delays at international crossings. In July 2022, Toronto Pearson International Airport ranked number one worst airport in terms of delays and there were also significant delays reported at Montreal Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport.
The Minister of Transport has defended ArriveCan as vital in preventing the spread of Covid despite evidence that vaccines cannot stop transmission or infection. The minister also claimed ArriveCAN has not caused the ongoing travel backlog, despite evidence that the CBSA agents have stated it is in fact causing delays.
The Justice Centre has filed a Notice of Application against the federal government and is awaiting a trial date.
“The Justice Centre has heard from thousands of Canadians who have been negatively impacted by the federal government’s mandatory requirement to use ArriveCan. Thousands of law-abiding citizens have been fined egregiously simply for returning to their home country. The differential treatment and discriminating between vaccinated and unvaccinated travellers also defies science, which the federal government claims to follow,” says Eva Chipiuk, a lawyer on this case.
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When the first rigs rolled toward Ottawa in January 2022, the air was sharp, but not as sharp as the mood of the men and women behind the wheels. They were not radicals. Seeing a CBC a campaign of disinformation about them begin as soon as their trek started, even when Ottawa political operatives hadn’t yet heard, I started following several of them on their social media.
They were truckers, small business owners, independent contractors, and working Canadians who had spent two years hauling the essentials that kept a paralyzed nation alive. They were the same people politicians, including Prime Minister Trudeau, had called “heroes” in 2020. By 2022, they had become “threats.”
The Freedom Convoy was born from exhaustion with naked hypocrisy. The federal government that praised them for risking exposure on the road now barred the unvaccinated from crossing borders or even earning a living. Many in provincial governments cheered Ottawa on. The same officials who flew to foreign conferences maskless or sat in private terraces to dine, let’s recall, still forced toddlers to wear masks in daycare. Public servants worked from home while police fined citizens for walking in parks.
These contradictions were not trivial; they were models of tyrannical rule. They told ordinary people that rules were for the ruled, not for rulers.
By late 2021, Canada’s pandemic response had hardened into a hysterical moral regime. Compliance became a measure of virtue, not prudence. Citizens who questioned the mandates were mocked as conspiracy theorists. Those who questioned vaccine efficacy were treated as fools; those who refused vaccination were treated as contagious heretics. Even science was no longer scientific. When data showed that vaccines did not prevent transmission, officials changed definitions instead of policies. The regime confused authority with truth. One former provincial premier just this week was still hailing the miracle of “life-saving” COVID vaccines.
For truckers, the breaking point came with the federal vaccine mandate for cross-border transport. Many had already complied with provincial rules and workplace testing. Others had recovered from COVID and had natural immunity that the government refused to recognize. To them, the new rule was not about safety; it was about humiliation. It said, “Obey, or you are unfit to work.”
So they drove.
Donna Laframboise, one of the rare journalists who works for citizens instead of sponsors, described the convoy in her book Thank You, Truckers! with gratitude and awe. She saw not a mob but a moral statement. She showcased for us Canadians who refused to live by lies. Their horns announced what polite society whispered: the emergency had become a creepy habit, and the habit had become a tool of control.
When the convoy reached Ottawa, it was messy, loud, and human. There was singing, prayer, laughter, dancing and some foolishness, but also remarkable discipline. For three weeks, amid frigid temperatures and rising tension, there were no riots, no arsons, no looting. In a country that once prized civility, that should have earned respect.
Instead, it attracted the media’s and government’s contempt.
The Trudeau government, rattled by its own public failures, sprung to portray the protest as a national security threat. Ministers invoked language fit for wartime. The Prime Minister, who had initially fled the city claiming to have tested positive, returned to declare that Canadians were under siege by “racists” and “misogynists.” The accusations were as reckless as they were false. The government’s real grievance was not chaos but defiance.
Then came the Emergencies Act. Designed for war, invasion, or insurrection, it was now deployed against citizens with flags and thermoses. Bank accounts were frozen without charge or trial. Insurance policies were suspended. Police weilding clubs were unleashed against unarmed citizens. The federal government did not enforce the law; it improvised it.
A faltering government declared itself the victim of its citizens. The Emergency declaration was not a reaction to danger; it was a confession of political insecurity. It exposed a leadership that could not tolerate dissent and recast obedience for peace.
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The convoy’s organizers, who kept the protest largely peaceful, were arrested and prosecuted as though they had plotted sedition. They were charged for holding the line, not for breaking it. The state’s behaviour was vindictive, not judicial. Prosecutors went along with it, and so did courts.
In a healthy democracy, such political trials would have shaken Parliament to its core. Legislators would have demanded justification for the use of emergency powers. The press would have asked precisely which law had been broken. Citizens would have debated the limits of government in times of fear, times which seem to continue just under the radar.
Not much of that happened.
Canada’s institutions have grown timid. The press is subsidized and more subservient. The courts happily defer to the administrative state. Law enforcement has learned to follow politics before principle. Academics have been lost for about generation. Under such conditions, how can citizens object to unscientific and coercive policies? What options remain when every channel of dissent—media, science, judiciary, and law enforcement—is captured or cowed?
The convoy’s protest, let’s remember, was not the first major disruption in the Trudeau years. A year earlier, Indigenous activists blocked rail lines and highways in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposed to a pipeline. The blockades cost the economy millions. They were called “a national conversation.” Few arrests, no frozen accounts, no moral panic.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter marches were cheered by politicians and news anchors. Some protests were peaceful, others destructive. Yet they were treated as expressions of justice, not extremism.
Even today, pro-Hamas Palestinian demonstrations that include violence and intimidation of Jewish citizens are tolerated with a shrug. The police stand back, bring them coffee, citing “the right to protest.”
Why, then, was the Freedom Convoy treated as a crisis of state?
In a liberal democracy, protest is not rebellion. It is a civic instrument, a reminder that authority is contingent. When a government punishes peaceful protest because it disapproves of the message, it turns democracy into décor.
The trials of the convoy organizers are therefore not about law but about legitimacy. Each conviction signals that protest is permitted only when it pleases the powerful. This is the logic of every soft tyranny: it criminalizes opposition while decorating itself with the vocabulary of rights. I see this daily in Nicaragua, my native land.
The truckers’ protest revealed what the pandemic concealed. The COVID regime was unscientific and incoherent. It punished truckers who worked alone in their cabs while allowing politicians to mingle maskless at conferences. It barred unvaccinated Canadians from air travel but allowed infected citizens to cross borders with the proper paperwork. It closed playgrounds and churches while keeping liquor stores open.
These contradictions were not mistakes; they were instruments of obedience. Each absurd rule tested how much submission people would endure.
The truckers said, “Enough.” I am grateful that they did.
For that, Chris Barber (Big Red) and Tamara Lich are still being punished. Their trials have now concluded, save for possible appeals, yet their quiet defiance remains one of the few honest moments in recent Canadian history. It showed that courage is still possible, even the state seems to forbid reason.
The government’s response revealed the opposite: that fear, once politicized, is never surrendered willingly. The state that learned to rule through emergency will not soon unlearn it. They cling to its uses still.
Canada lives with the legacy of that winter today. The trials are finished, but the divisions persist. Half the country still believes the convoy was a menace; the other half thinks it was a mirror that showed how fragile our freedoms had become.
Trudeau’s government is no more, yet the spirit of his politics lingers. He did not create the divisions by accident. He cultivated them as a strategy of control. The country that left him behind is also less free, less trusting, and less united than it was before the horns sounded in Ottawa. Carney’s government is Trudeau’s heir.
The trials and sentencing measure the distance between the Canada we imagined and the one we inhabit.
The truckers’ convoy was imperfect, yet profoundly democratic. It stood for the right of citizens to say no to a government that had forgotten how to hear them. The echo of that refusal still moves down the Trans-Canada Highway. It is the sound of liberty idling in the cold, waiting for a green light that will not soon come.
This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for the abounding love and understanding in my life. I am grateful for my spirited children and their children. I am grateful for my nonagenarian father and for my siblings. I’m grateful for the legion of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews on all sides of the family. I am grateful for loyal friendships and for my colleagues and coworkers who share the quest for a freer country. I’m grateful to my adoptive Alberta, and Albertans, also struggling to be strong and free.
I am grateful for the Truckers, wherever they came from, for their courage.
‘To whom shall I apologize? Thousands of Canadians who stopped planning to take their own lives or were able to return to their jobs, kiss dying loved ones or have families over for Thanksgiving?’
Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich, reflecting on her recent house arrest verdict, said she has no “remorse” and will not “apologize” for leading a movement that demanded an end to all COVID mandates.
Lich revealed in anX postthis week that in conversations with her lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, over the past few months, she told him, “I would not, and could not, express remorse as it would be dishonest and disingenuous.”
“To whom shall I apologize? The thousands of Canadians who stopped planning to take their own lives when the convoy started? To the thousands of Canadians who were able to return to their jobs? Or should I apologize to all the Canadians who can kiss their dying loved ones or have their families over for Thanksgiving?” she observed.
On October 7, Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey sentencedLich and Chris Barber to 18 months’ house arrest after being convicted earlier in the year convicted of “mischief.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian government was hoping to put Lich in jail for no less than seven years and Barber for eight years for their roles in the 2022 protests against COVID mandates.
Interestingly, Perkins-McVey said about Lich and Barber during the sentencing, “They came with the noblest of intent and did not advocate for violence.”
In Lich’s X post, she noted that while she has “no doubt” some citizens of Ottawa “felt afraid, threatened and terrorized” by the protests, she blamed the Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“How could they not when their mayor and politicians were labeling us as an angry mob coming to overthrow the government before we even left Alberta?” she wrote.
“Do I feel bad for these people? Of course I do. I wish no ill will upon anyone. However, it was their very own leaders who lied to them and misled them. There are citizens in Ottawa genuinely afraid of working-class Canadians, who had never met a trucker or an oil patch worker.”
Lich noted how she told her lawyer that she would “serve 100 years in prison before I will ever apologize.”
Specifically, Barber was handed an 18-month conditional sentence, with a concurrent three-month sentence for counseling disobedience of a court order that can be served in the community.
Lich was given 18 months less time already spent in custody, amounting to 15 1/2 months.
Both Lich and Barber must remain in their house for the first 12 months except for medical emergencies and certain appointments. They are allowed to work and can leave their house for certain permitted activities for up to five hours once a week. They were also given a curfew and 100 hours of community service.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Barber thanked Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis for “speaking up” in support of him and Canadians’ freedom rights after he and Lich were sentenced.
LifeSiteNews reported that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre offered his thoughts on the sentencing, wishing them a “peaceful” life while stopping short of blasting the sentence as his fellow MPs did.
In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) on February 14, 2022.