On Tuesday, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber received 12 months of house arrest followed by six months of curfew for their roles in the 2022 three-week blockade of Ottawa. However, they will be able to leave their homes on occasion, such as going to work or visiting family members.
It is a reasonable sentence considering the verdict, more than the conditional discharges asked for by the defence, but a lot less than the prosecution’s demand of seven years of jail time for Lich and eight years of prison for Barber.
The sentences asked for by prosecutors were a harsh, bitter, vengeful overreaction and totally in keeping with how this ludicrous soap opera has played out.
The circus that was the Freedom Convoy rolled into Ottawa on Jan. 29, 2022. It was supposed to be truckers protesting mandatory vaccine mandates, but assorted hangers also had their own agendas.
Pretty soon the bouncy castles and hot tubs gave way to the blaring of horns night and day that must have been horrendous for city residents.
But the Freedom Convoy was always much less than some people and politicians made it out to be.
The Freedom Convoy will go on dividing Canada
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During hearings at the public inquiry into the government’s use of the Emergecencies Act, one woman stood near the entrance
calling convoy organizers “terrorists.”
Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister of the day, portrayed them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government.
It was Shakespearean farce, but Liberals like Mendicino were happy to play politics and paint the convoy protesters as lawless subversives bent on destroying democracy.
The government theatrics escalated with the imposition of the Emergencies Act, proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce. Within days, police had cleared the convoy and several other blockades without incident.
This was less the power of the Emergencies Act and more to do with getting the police to just act.
All this set the stage for a national inquiry because, let’s face it, there is nothing like a good legal drama.
And so here we are, almost four years after the trucks rolled onto Parliament Hill, at the end of Lich’s and Barber’s own interminably long trial. Both were found guilty of mischief, for their role in obstructing the use of roads and property, and Barber was also found guilty of counselling others to disobey a court order.
In imposing the conditional sentences, the judge was reflecting the reality connected with a mischief verdict and not the fictional nightmare of terrorist anarchists envisaged by others.
However, prosecutors seem intent on keeping the nightmare alive with a request to seize Barber’s truck, a demand the judge called “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”
And Lich’s drama is set to continue after The Democracy Fund, who helped pay for her legal team,
announced that they would appeal her conviction and sentence.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two of the leaders behind the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” protests, have been handed conditional sentences after being found guilty of mischief in April for their involvement in the controversial blockades that took over Ottawa for several weeks during the COVID-19...
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