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Justin Trudeau's political prisoners have officially been exonerated. A jury in Lethbridge, Alberta found the remaining two defendants of the Coutts Four, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert, not guilty. The men had been charged with conspiracy to murder charges as a result of their participation in the non-violent Truckers Freedom Convoy in February 2022, and they had been held in custody ever since, denied bail in spite of no history of violence or criminal records.
Their 30-month incarceration and subsequent legal victory are not just the tale of authoritarian overreach by the Trudeau administration. They tell the story of the wider political battle between the professional managerial class throughout the West and the working class over whom they rule—and the cost to four working-class men of fighting back.
Two of Carbert and Olienick's co-defendants, Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, had all of the original charges against them dropped in a plea deal arrangement which saw them released from custody back in February, a week shy of having spent two years in a form of carceral purgatory known as remand. With two fewer defendants, the Crown's allegations of "conspiracy" were already on shaky ground even before the trial of Olienick and Carbert began in earnest on June 6.
But it was clear from the get-go that the trial was a political trial, as Olienick's lawyer pointed out in her opening statement, giving voice to the concerns of many Canadians who have witnessed the treatment of the Coutts men with horror.
Three of the men were arrested in Coutts, Alberta, on the evening of February 13, 2022, when officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raided the private property where Carbert, Olienick, and Lysak were staying; they arrested Jerry Morin the next day on his way to work. The Coutts Four had been demonstrating against the COVID regime of Justin Trudeau, one of many such Freedom Convoy protests that came together across the country. Like their brothers in Ottawa, hundreds of truckers and farmers used their trucks and equipment to slow down traffic at the Coutts border crossing, near Sweetgrass, Montana. Though traffic was not completely blocked by the protesters and other border crossings nearby were available, the slow down at Coutts, along with total highway blockades set up nearby by the RCMP at Milk River, Alberta, was claimed to have incurred significant costs to Alberta's economy.
The real crime of the protests, however, was skepticism of Justin Trudeau's rule, which they represented. The following day, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, suspending the civil liberties of all Canadians to crush the Freedom Convoy, and he used accusations against protesters in Coutts as a primary factor.
That's why Trudeau needed the Coutts Four to be attempted murderers: To justify this authoritarian move, he needed to prove that there was an actual threat at the time, rather than just his desire to exercise raw power, and the Coutts Four provided the fodder. Their case was used not just by Trudeau but by his ministers as one of the main reasons for invoking the Emergencies Act; Justice Paul Rouleau cited the Coutts situation in his "reluctant" approval of Trudeau's use of the Act as part of the mandatory inquest into that invocation.
Trudeau and his government used damning claims made by undercover police officers about the Coutts Four and their rhetoric as evidence of their violent nature, which was then used by Canadian media outlets to smear the men in the days and months following their arrest. (This smearing operation was so toxic that the men's lawyers sought a publication ban on these officers' notes, which the media mostly ignored.)
Yet during the trial, it was revealed that not one of the claims made by the undercover cops had any kind of evidence to back it up—no recording, no bodycam footage, nothing. When video footage of Tony Olienick's interrogation by the RCMP was played for the court, nothing he said corroborated the accusation of a conspiracy to murder. Text messages and group chats obtained by the RCMP were likewise short on imminent threats of violence, much less evidence of any conspiracy to murder. The trial devolved into intricate debates over the meaning of emojis and Olienick's criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party and the United Nations.
Furthermore, documents obtained under an Access to Information and Privacy Act request showed that the RCMP had been profiling protesters by running license plates through databases, then focusing in on those who possessed federal gun licenses. It was also revealed that Tony Olienick became a target for the RCMP because an undercover officer heard someone in Smuggler's Saloon, a bar in Coutts that had become a de-facto meeting place for the protesters, say that Olienick was going to bring her some Ivermectin, a medication that has been hotly contested in use for treating COVID. In other testimony, we heard that Chris Carbert had rejected COVID payments from the Canadian government, handed out to businesses across the country in a vain effort to keep the economy going under Trudeau's oppressive mandates.
Carbert and Olienick were acquitted of conspiracy to murder, but they were found guilty of lessor charges—mischief and "possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose" for having small caliber hunting rifles stored in Carbert's travel trailer at a nearby property. What that "dangerous purpose" was is a mystery that resides in the minds of the jury, as the Crown, having failed to prove conspiracy to murder, also failed to identify any dangerous intent on the part of either Carbert or Olienick.
Still, their ordeal is not yet over. After the verdict was read, defense counsel for the men asked for bail hearings immediately, so the men could be released until sentencing, which is tentatively scheduled for August 12, but Crown Prosecutor Steven Johnston, holding on to Trudeau's pound of flesh til the last, voiced his objection. The men remain in remand.
It's soon enough to ask crucial questions, not just about the miscarriage of justice but about how Canada's media did Trudeau's dirty work for him by smearing four innocent men in the court of public opinion, refusing to report on any countervailing evidence or ask any questions at all of the strange circumstances around this case.
Those questions abound: Why were men with no criminal records or history of violence denied bail for two years?
Why were Jerry Morin and Tony Olienick kept for lengthy periods of solitary confinement, a recognized form of torture, and denied necessary medical care?
The media in Canada made other victims of carceral torture, Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, into household names. Why not lift a finger to defend these men?
At the end of the day, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert were prosecuted for thought crimes, nothing more. Their convictions on these other lesser offenses, if not overturned, will act as a dangerous precedent.
With any luck, Olienick and Carbert will be released back to their long suffering families on time served, their lesser convictions will be appealed, and, perhaps, we may get some kind of official investigation into what went on with this case, in which the paranoia of Justin Trudeau and his inability to contend with democratic protest led to a very worrisome case of political prisoners being held in a modern western nation state.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
