Roughly a year and a half since a group of Canadian truckers ground the country’s capital to a halt in protest, two of its leaders are set to go on trial.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two of the “Freedom Convoy’s” organizers, are going to trial on Tuesday for their role in the three-week protest early last year. The two are being accused of mischief, obstructing police, counseling others to commit mischief, and intimidation, the CBC reported.
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The trial regarding one of the largest protests Canada has seen in years is likely to renew attention to the display that drew international attention.
In late January 2022, a large group of big-rig trucks drove to Ottawa to protest Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s COVID-19 policies, which they saw as authoritarian. The immediate casus belli for the protest was the imposition of a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the United States-Canada border.
The convoy consisted of roughly 400 large trucks and other vehicles, which were parked around Parliament Hill, blocking traffic. The protest ballooned in size as others joined the truckers, and several spinoff protests set up shop in other cities as well, blocking international crossing points with the U.S.
In Ottawa, the trucks blared their air horns day and night, irritating residents. The protests took on a party-like atmosphere for some time as the protesters set up a stage, bouncy castles, and even an outdoor hot tub. The protesters also set off fireworks.
On Feb. 14, 2022, Trudeau undertook the unprecedented move of invoking the Emergencies Act, authorizing a crackdown on the protests. Protesters’ bank accounts were frozen, and dozens were arrested, among them Lich and Barber.
Of their charges, mischief is likely to be the biggest point of contention for the two organizers. Canadian law defines mischief “as the willful destruction, damaging, obstruction, or interference of property,” the BBC reported.
Despite the obvious political nature of the trial, the organizers’ lawyers have stressed that the trial is not about the Freedom Convoy in and of itself.
“We do not expect this to be the trial of the ‘Freedom Convoy,”‘ they said in a joint statement Friday, obtained by the CBC. “The central issue will be whether the actions of two of the organizers of a peaceful protest should warrant criminal sanction.”
Despite this, analysts and the defendants acknowledge that the trial has wide-ranging implications, both for other Freedom Convoy protesters and Canadian law in general.
The trial “pits the free speech and free association rights of convoy organizers against the public interest in keeping city streets liveable for residents,” Paul Daly, the chairman in administrative law and governance at the University of Ottawa, said. He added that the central point of the trial will be deciding how much responsibility the two hold for any illegal acts by the other protesters.
Lich has acknowledged that she believes her trial will set a precedent for others being tried in connection with the Freedom Convoy.
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“That’s why I’m not going down without a fight and we will come out swinging,” she said in July.
Another key aspect will be how close Lich and Barker were in their activities surrounding the protest: Prosecutors are trying to portray the two as completely in sync, allowing evidence against one to apply to both of them. The two have not been allowed to speak with each other without a lawyer present since their arrest.
