Back in April, the longest mischief trial in Canadian history wrapped up against Chris Barber and Tamara Lich, prominent faces of the most successful populist uprising in recent history: Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
In a trial that is estimated to have cost the Canadian taxpayer upwards of $10 million and dragged on for 20 months (as crimes like the September 2023 drive-by mass shooting of an Ottawa wedding remain unsolved), crown attorneys debated the meaning of terms like “hold the line” while they doggedly pursued guilty verdicts for Barber and Lich, downplaying the entirely nonviolent character of the duo’s actions, as well as their full cooperation with police.
The hardworking Barber family represents an archetype in Canada, hardy settlers who tamed a vast wilderness, contending with harsh winters and vast distances few will understand.
Lich and Barber were eventually both found guilty of “mischief,” a property charge under Canadian law that can carry a 10-year prison sentence. Barber was also found guilty on a separate charge of counseling to disobey a court order. The Crown is seeking to put Lich away for seven years, and Barber for eight, sending a clear signal to Canadians: Don’t you dare oppose us ever again.
Enemies of the state
In her finding of guilt, Justice Heather Perkins McVey came to the conclusion that public enjoyment of the streets of Ottawa were of a weightier and more important consideration than Lich and Barber’s rights to protest, even though Lich didn’t park a truck on any street herself, and Barber’s rig was parked in places Ottawa police told him to park it.
Again, for a pair of normal working-class people with no criminal records whom the Canadian government turned into enemies of the state, they were awfully cooperative with cops and the city of Ottawa, contra Justin Trudeau’s state media making them out to be dangerous insurrectionists.
Sentencing on their convictions will take place on October 7. In the meantime, the province of Ontario, lead by Doug Ford (brother of the late, infamous Toronto mayor Rob Ford), is seeking to impose an even more egregious punishment against Barber and his family: seizing his iconic 2003 Kenworth W900L rig, “Big Red,” which has become one of the defining symbols of the Freedom Convoy.
Red notice
As I wrote here back in April:
Barber’s rig had become a symbol of the Freedom Convoy, featured in thousands of pictures, videos, and memes, as it led the Western Canadian Convoy to Ottawa. Barber has owned and operated that truck since 2003 and put 3.4 million kilometers (roughly 2.1 million miles) on it, mostly hauling heavy agricultural equipment across his home province of Saskatchewan and picking up new equipment from factories in America for his customers.
In the 22 years Barber has owned and operated that truck, he has raised his children in it over trips too many to count, and when his dog Buddy was approaching the end of his life, the poor old dog was put down while lying on the passenger seat: Buddy’s favorite place to be.
Under the Emergencies Act, Barber (like many others) had his bank account frozen; the Crown never mentioned anything about seizing Barber’s truck. Perhaps it was a “backup” punishment once a federal court ruled that Trudeau’s invocation of the act was unconstitutional. (Under the administration of Trudeau’s successor, former governor of the Banks of Canada and England Mark Carney, an appeal to that ruling is working its way through the courts.)
Passing the buck
Who initiated this wicked and capricious forfeiture process? We may never know. Testifying at the first day of hearings about seizing Big Red last week — Friday, September 12 — Det. Kari Launen of the OPS Provincial Asset Forfeiture Unit claimed that it was all his idea.
As Lich posted on X:
When asked if he had been directed by the crown to commence this investigation, the detective said he was not. He says he gets requests but it is up to him due to his lengthy career and extensive experience to decide how and when to investigate. He then volunteered that he wasn’t directed by the crown but only commenced the investigation after he’d had some meetings with the crown (in which he was definitely NOT directed by the crown). The Invisible Man must have telepathically communicated these investigative urges into his psyche. He clarified that he was not directed but “given a task,” again by No One.
It is interesting that Detective Launen claims to have such latitude in deciding what to investigate. Consider the experience of one of his colleagues, Ottawa Police Service Detective Helen Grus. Grus was recently censured for taking it upon herself to investigate a string of nine infant deaths that occurred around Ottawa in the aftermath of the COVID vaccine rollout.
Strange that Grus — part of the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse unit — should be reprimanded for investigating deaths clearly within her purview, while Launen’s interest in the ownership records of a truck from a province on the other side of the country should raise nary an eyebrow.
Still truckin’
Last week I spoke with Barber by phone. He was behind the wheel of Big Red, speaking with me via Bluetooth headset, en route through Saskatchewan while doing what he does best — moving the massive agricultural machinery which helps the Canadian Prairies produce grains which feed the world its daily bread.
“We hired Brendan Miller from Calgary to represent CB Trucking, the company my son and I own 50/50, and my lawyer Diane Magas from Ottawa was there as well,” Barber told me.
“Miller threw a wrench into things; normally Ottawa Court is staid and procedural, but Miller really went deep into case law, and it seemed like he was teaching Justice Perkins-McVey at times. … The Crown got angry when Miller accused them of acting in bad faith.”
RELATED: Canadian feds to seize iconic ‘Big Red’ as Freedom Convoy persecution rolls on
Chris Barber
Family target
The Crown has now also set its sights on Barber’s son Jonathan. Why, they ask, did Barber give Jonathan a 50% stake in the family trucking company — and, by extension, an ownership stake in Big Red — after first facing charges in 2022?
But what the court bizarrely frames as a tacit admission of guilt likely has a much more straightforward explanation. Facing the potential destruction of his business in the wake of these criminal charges as well as a nearly $300 million civil suit brought by a group of citizens in Ottawa (who, it ought be noted, have brought no such such suit against the Hamas enthusiasts who have been harassing the citizens of Ottawa with impunity for nearly two years straight), it only made sense for Barber to try and protect his business assets via a fairly common transfer of partial ownership. Add to that the fact that seizure of Big Red wasn’t even on the table until a few months ago.
None of that is enough to satisfy the Crown, apparently: Both Jonathan and Barber’s parents have been called to testify this Thursday, in these painfully slower and somehow more evil Kafka-esque proceedings which resumed Monday, September 22.
‘A tough kid’
“Jonathan is a tough kid,” Barber told me of his son, who recently survived more or less unscathed a collision that tore his Peterbilt rig apart (an impatient fellow trucker attempted to pass Jonathan as he attempted to negotiate a major turn with the same kind of massive equipment his dad hauls).
“He’s really stepped up to the plate in managing the business while I have been busy with court and lawyers meetings and all the travel to Ottawa,” Barber continued.
Given that Barber and his family live outside the Saskatchewan town of Swift Current, (known by locals and old school truckers as “Speedy Creek”) a little over 1,800 miles from Ottawa, the last two years of trial have involved an incredible amount of travel. Barber’s parents only live three-quarters of a mile away and often stop in to feed and water his horses and dogs while he is in Ottawa or away trucking.
While I spoke with Chris, his daughter Sierra escorted him in a pilot truck, a mandatory requirement for loads the size Barber specializes in.
Canadian archetype
The hardworking Barber family represents an archetype in Canada, hardy settlers who tamed a vast wilderness, contending with harsh winters and vast distances few will understand. These were the vast majority of Freedom Convoy participants, who easily managed the logistics and likewise dealt with the cold Ottawa winter, so it is no surprise that a government that seeks to make people weak and dependent continues to attack them.
In a video Barber posted online, he explained what he and his family are up against:
Because [prosecutors] are so vindictive and so hateful and so spiteful, they want more.
Our fear is right now that if the judge … throws the forfeiture out, that allows the Crown to then go back to the province of Saskatchewan at a later date and say, ‘We want that truck, and we want you to help.’ So what we’re trying to do right now is bat that right out of the bloody park, and that’s going to prolong things. We’re talking probably six months of trial. We’re talking possibly Supreme Court.
Barber has already gone through the longest mischief trial in the history of the nation and has been the subject of the most vicious and protracted lawfare the country has ever seen — all for his role in peacefully resisting Canada’s draconian vaccine mandates.
That the government is now so bent on destroying a potent symbol of that resistance reveals something deeply authoritarian about both the Liberal-controlled Canada of the last decade and the managerial regimes of so many other countries that acted in a similar fashion. Americans should take note.
