COVID-19
Police clear out border blockade as Ottawa seeks deal with convoy to start rolling
Protesters decrying COVID-19 restrictions and the federal government itself were moved from the mouth of a crucial trade route with the United States on Sunday, while confusion reigned over whether a group stationed in Ottawa would reduce their footprint in the capital’s core.
Officers in Windsor, Ont., arrested some two dozen protesters and moved others from the busy Ambassador Bridge spanning the Detroit River, towing five vehicles on Sunday at the site where protesters brought traffic to a halt for nearly a week and barring others from arriving on scene.
Windsor Police Chief Pamela Mizuno said officers are working to reopen roadways, but did not provide a timeline as to when that would occur. The reopening would allow the resumption of hundreds of millions of dollars in daily cross-border trade between Canada and the United States.
But despite the show of force as a line of officers marched on demonstrators who had clogged traffic on the key trade corridor, protesters opposed to COVID-19 restrictions and the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continued to wave Canadian flags and holler the word “freedom,” with one shouting into a megaphone, “This is a peaceful protest.”
Wearing a Canadian flag around her shoulders, Windsor resident Karen Parrinello said she’s been coming out to demonstrate since Thursday evening and plans to be there for the long haul.
“As long as it takes, I’ll keep coming back. I can’t stay here all day, but I’ll come back here a couple hours a time every day until it’s better, until all the mandates are gone and we have our freedoms back,” she said.
Police in Windsor had negotiated with protesters over the weekend to get them to leave, warning of arrests if they kept bridge traffic at a standstill.
Police said between 25 and 30 people were arrested, many of whom are now facing mischief charges. Mizuno said roughly a dozen vehicles were also seized or towed over the weekend.
“There are steps we need to take in order to open the roadways so that we don’t encounter the same issues,” she said at an afternoon news conference. “Please note we are moving as fast as we can, however, we need to make sure this is a safe and sustainable solution.”
While Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens expressed his thanks to police, he issued a similar statement to residents of his border city who “respected the process needed to find a resolution.”
“Canada is a nation that believes in the right to freedom of speech and expression, but we are also bound by the rule of law,” Dilkens said in a statement.
Hours later, his counterpart in Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson, released letters he said were between himself and organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy about a deal to move some of the 400 vehicles encamped downtown to Parliament Hill and away from residential neighbourhoods.
The correspondence between the two sides suggested convoy organizers agreed to start moving trucks to Wellington Street, which runs in front of Parliament Hill, as well as a host of parliamentary buildings including the Prime Minister’s Office. Those moves, according to the letter, will get underway Monday.
If moves happen before the noon deadline Watson set in his letter, Ottawa’s mayor agreed to meet with the protesters who, on Sunday, turned intersections once busy with traffic into dance floors with loudspeakers and draped themselves in the Canadian flag as they wandered downtown streets amid idling vehicles and semis.
In a note to city councillors, Watson’s office said any movement of trucks wouldn’t be “a long-term solution to the occupation,” but a step to reduce the impact on those who live in the area.
On Sunday night, convoy board president Tamara Lich tweeted that plans to relocate trucks would go ahead on Monday, posting the note hours after denying any deal and vowing to stay downtown until federal vaccine mandates are eliminated.
Residents who have become frustrated with a lack of movement on the situation joined with a local city councillor and provincial politician to block a convoy on its way to join up with demonstrators downtown.
Sean Burgess said the spontaneous counter-protest, organized late Saturday evening, should be a clear signal to federal, provincial and local leaders about ending what even Watson has described as an illegal occupation of the capital’s core.
“Ottawa is not the dull city all of Canada thinks, but it’s certainly not a city of people who get out in the street and become activists, particularly spontaneously,” Burgess said by the line of counter-protesters.
“So when you see people in a neighborhood like Old Ottawa South, who would rather complain, and litigate, so to speak, rather than take direct action on the streets, standing in front of trucks saying to the cops, ‘fine, arrest me,’ then you know that something has gone really too far.”
In a statement, Ontario Premier Doug Ford called anew on protesters in Ottawa to leave, while praising the Windsor police, Ontario Provincial Police and RCMP officers who worked to reopen the Ambassador Bridge.
The developments in Ontario came as protests continued around the country in support of the convoys that set up camp in Ottawa.
Police contended with demonstrations at other border crossings, including in British Columbia where four people were arrested near the border crossing in Surrey. That crossing remained open as of Sunday, the Canada Border Services Agency said.
The ongoing protests spurred Trudeau to meet with senior officials and cabinet members. He said in a late night tweet that his “incident response group” covered further actions the federal government can take.
“We’ll keep working urgently on this – to protect jobs, public safety, our neighbourhoods, and our economy,” the tweet said.
Trudeau was also to invite premiers to a meeting Monday about the protests, according to a government source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 13, 2022.
– With files from Justin Tang and Marie Woolf in Ottawa, and Brieanna Charlebois in Vancouver.
Noushin Ziafati and Jordan Press, The Canadian Press
Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.
Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.
In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.
Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”
The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.
Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.
In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.
As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.
There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.
And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.
Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.
Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.
And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.
The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.
It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.
The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.
It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.
These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.
As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
By Cindy Harper
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A Canadian court has ordered the release of documents that could shed light on how federal authorities and law enforcement worked together to freeze the bank accounts of a protester involved in the Freedom Convoy.
Both the RCMP and TD Bank are now required to provide records related to Evan Blackman, who took part in the 2022 demonstrations and had his accounts frozen despite not being convicted of any crime at the time.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) announced the Ontario Court of Justice ruling. The organization is representing Blackman, whose legal team argues that the actions taken against him amounted to a serious abuse of power.
“The freezing of Mr. Blackman’s bank accounts was an extreme overreach on the part of the police and the federal government,” said his lawyer, Chris Fleury. “These records will hopefully reveal exactly how and why Mr. Blackman’s accounts [were] frozen.”
Blackman was arrested during the mass protests in Ottawa, which drew thousands of Canadians opposed to vaccine mandates and other pandemic-era restrictions.
Although he faced charges of mischief and obstructing police, those charges were dismissed in October due to a lack of evidence. Despite this, prosecutors have appealed, and a trial is set to begin on August 14.
At the height of the protests, TD Bank froze three of Blackman’s accounts following government orders issued under the Emergencies Act. Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had invoked the act to grant his government broad powers to disrupt the protest movement, including the unprecedented use of financial institutions to penalize individuals for their support or participation.
In 2024, a Federal Court Justice ruled that Trudeau’s decision to invoke the act had not been justified.
Blackman’s legal team plans to use the newly released records to demonstrate the extent of government intrusion into personal freedoms.
According to the JCCF, this case may be the first in Canada where a criminal trial includes a Charter challenge over the freezing of personal bank accounts under emergency legislation.
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