Justin Trudeau’s political prisoners have been officially exonerated. A jury in Lethbridge, Alta., found the other two accused in the Coutts Four, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert, not guilty. The men had been charged with conspiracy to murder following their participation in the non-violent Truckers for Freedom convoy in February 2022, and have been held without bail since then despite having no history of violence or criminal record.
Their 30-month incarceration and subsequent court victory are not just a tale of the Trudeau administration’s overreach. They also tell the story of a larger political battle between the Western professional managerial class and the working class they govern, and the price that the struggle against the latter has cost four workers.
Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, two of Carbert and Olienick’s co-accused, had all initial charges against them dropped as part of a plea deal that saw them released in February, a week shy of spending two years in a form of prison purgatory known as pretrial detention. With two fewer defendants, the Crown’s “conspiracy” allegations were already on shaky ground before Olienick and Carbert’s trial began in earnest on June 6.
But it was clear from the start that the trial was a political trial, as Olienick’s lawyer pointed out in her opening statement, expressing the concerns of many Canadians who witnessed in horror the treatment of the Coutts men.
Three of the men were arrested in Coutts, Alberta, on the evening of February 13, 2022, when Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers raided the private property where Carbert, Olienick, and Lysak were staying; they arrested Jerry Morin the next day as he was on his way to work. The Coutts four were protesting Justin Trudeau’s COVID regime, one of many Freedom Convoy protests that gathered across the country. Like their Ottawa brethren, hundreds of truckers and farmers used their trucks and equipment to slow traffic at the Coutts border crossing near Sweetgrass, Montana. While traffic was not completely blocked by protesters and other nearby border crossings were available, the slowdown at Coutts, as well as the full highway blockades set up nearby by the RCMP in Milk River, Alberta, would have come at significant costs to Alberta’s economy.
The real crime of the protesters, however, was skepticism of the Justin Trudeau regime, which they represented. The next day, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, suspending the civil liberties of all Canadians to crush the freedom march, and he used the charges against the Coutts protesters as a major factor.
This is why Trudeau needed the Coutts four to be suspected murderers: to justify this authoritarian measure, he had to prove that there was a real threat at the time, rather than simply his desire to exercise raw power, and the Coutts four provided the material for the argument. Their case was used not only by Trudeau, but also by his ministers as one of the main reasons for invoking the Emergencies Act; Justice Paul Rouleau cited the situation of the Coutts four in his “reluctant” approval of Trudeau’s use of the Act as part of the mandatory inquiry into its invocation.
Trudeau and his government used the damning statements made by undercover cops about the Coutts Four and their rhetoric as evidence of their violent nature, which was then used by the Canadian media to smear the men in the days and months after their arrest. (This smear campaign was so toxic that the men’s lawyers filed for a ban on the release of the cops’ notes, which the media largely ignored.)
Yet during the trial, it was revealed that none of the allegations made by the undercover officers were supported by any evidence: no recordings, no body cameras, nothing. When the video of Tony Olienick’s interrogation by the RCMP was played in court, nothing he said supported the murder conspiracy charge. The text messages and group chats obtained by the RCMP also showed little mention of imminent threats of violence, and even less evidence of any murder plot. The trial descended into complex debates over the meaning of emojis and Olienick’s criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and the United Nations.
Additionally, documents obtained under an Access to Information and Privacy Act request showed that the RCMP profiled protesters by running licence plates through databases and then focusing on those with federal gun permits. It was also revealed that Tony Olienick became a target for the RCMP because an undercover officer overheard someone at Smuggler’s Saloon, a Coutts bar that had become a de facto meeting place for protesters, say that Olienick was going to bring him Ivermectin, a drug whose use to treat COVID-19 has been hotly contested. In other testimony, we heard that Chris Carbert refused the Canadian government’s COVID payments, doled out to businesses across the country in a futile effort to keep the economy afloat under Trudeau’s oppressive mandates.
Carbert and Olienick were acquitted of conspiracy to murder, but were convicted of lesser charges: mischief and “possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose” for storing small-calibre shotguns in Carbert’s trailer on a neighbouring property. The nature of this “dangerous purpose” was a mystery to the jury, because the Crown, having failed to prove a conspiracy to murder, also failed to identify a dangerous intent on the part of Carbert or Olienick.
But their ordeal is not over yet. After the verdict was read, defence lawyers asked for an immediate bail hearing so the men could be released until sentencing, which is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 12, but Crown prosecutor Steven Johnston, who kept control of Trudeau until the end, objected. The men remain in pretrial custody.
It is time to ask critical questions, not only about the miscarriage of justice, but also about how the Canadian media did Trudeau’s dirty work for him by smearing four innocent men in the court of public opinion, refusing to report any contrary evidence or asking any questions about the bizarre circumstances surrounding this case.
Questions abound: Why were men with no criminal record or history of violence denied bail for two years?
Why were Jerry Morin and Tony Olienick held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, a recognized form of torture, and denied necessary medical care?
Canadian media have made other torture victims in prison, Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, household names. Why not lift a finger to defend these men?
Ultimately, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert were prosecuted for crimes of opinion, nothing more. Their convictions for these other, lesser crimes, if not overturned, will set a dangerous precedent.
Hopefully, Olienick and Carbert will be released and returned to their families who have suffered so much, after they have served their sentences, their lesser convictions will be appealed and, perhaps, we will have some sort of official inquiry into what happened in this case, in which Justin Trudeau’s paranoia and inability to deal with democratic protest led to a very disturbing case of political prisoners being held in a modern Western nation-state.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer and commentator. You can find him at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
