Canadian 'Freedom Convoy' protest leader found guilty
Summary
Pat King, a key figure in Canada’s 2022 “Freedom Convoy” protests, was found guilty on five charges, including mischief and counseling others to obstruct police, and faces up to 10 years in prison.
The protests, which blocked downtown Ottawa and key US-Canada border crossings for weeks, opposed COVID-19 mandates imposed by Prime Minister Trudeau’s government.
King was accused of inciting the blockade, coordinating disruptive actions like constant honking, and defying court orders.
He is the first protest leader convicted, while trials for other organizers are ongoing.
https://www.dw.com/en/canadian-freedom-convoy-leader-found-guilty-over-trucker-protest/a-70865199Open linkView original on lemmy.world490
Comments50
This article has zero mention of this guy being a white supremacist. Like he is on video saying white people are the superior race.
Omitting this is enabling right wing extremism.
Journalistic malpractice
Good.
Fuck the Kanada Klown Konvoy.
Thanks for helping to re-introduce diseases into your "stollen" Freedoms.
I really do hate people who conflate freedom with some notion that they get to be an asshole without any repercussions.
People in the US like to cry first amendment (freedom of speech, etc) any time something they say has consequences.
Funny how the same people with wE tHe PeOpLe bumper stickers are the ones who haven’t actually bothered to read the bill of rights.
Convites in Canada like to cry first amendment too. Just not Canada's first amendment in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Citing the US constitution. In Canadian courts.
Dwayne Lich, husband of arrested convoy leader Tamara Lich, told the judge at his wife's bail hearing that he was relying on his "First Amendment rights." CBC Feb 22
imo worse than Yanks confused and offended they can't bring their guns when they go shopping in Toronto. Just dumb over-entitled main characters.
Holy crap that’s wild. I can’t believe the right-wing disinformation campaign in the US is so extreme that it’s leaking beyond our borders.
Kinda reminds me of when the “sovereign citizens” claim that they are a “vessel” and therefore fall under maritime law.
“Whoa, you sure do know some words that are tangentially related to the matter at hand.”
It's been bonkers. We had one qanon grifter declare herself Queen of Canada and she has irl cultists follow her from town to town. During the worst of the pandemic, she had them sending death threats to healthcare workers (because Freedom). But even the main followers of the border shutdown and capitol occupation were frothy screwballs.
Like, they really shouldn't have turned her facebook off!
From my point of view, the right-wing disinfo campaign is global. Copy-paste. Conservatives up north are even using a lot of the exact same media relations people as yours down south.
Man that just sucks. I’ve seen a lot of reporting about the more “conservative” ideologies growing in several EU countries as well. It’s so disheartening. The whole movement is just convincing average people to vote/protest/etc against their own best interests, and oh by the way, education is bad too so don’t get educated or you might see through the charade!
What they want is 4chan but in real life.
That’s the thing tho, 4chan only works because no one gets to punch you in the face regardless of what you say.
Absolutely
“... and I’m just gonna say this out loud. The only way that this is gonna be stopped is with bullets. And yah, I said it.” - Rat King, filthy fucking nazi, Dec 2021.
Piece of crap was smiling through all the "not guilties." So brazen - I remember he even wore a Sons of Odin hoodie at his bail hearing back in '22.
Do you have a good source on that?
The article from the post said
So I’m curious if there is an obvious call to violence.
Enough wiggle room where it would not be considered a credible threat. There's a compilation video of statements he made on livestreams but I don't want to link to Twitter, and can't find it elsewhere quickly. It's discussed in the following article re: the Emergencies Act inquiry, among others - https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/emergencies-act-inquiry-hears-from-protester-pat-king-freedom-convoy-lawyer-1.6135959
Is Sons of Odin a band or is it something else? I remember a Norse metal band having a name like that.
It is. Or was. I don't know if the hoodie in question was for them.
EDIT: not Norse though. They're from the US.
I wonder why they were relevant to what they were saying then. They used to come up on my Pandora every once in a while when I was listening to Korpiklaani or Alestorm. Just wasn't 100% sure of the name.
Sons of Odin is also an anti-immigration organization, though in trying to get more details I'm having some difficulty differentiating between Soldiers of Odin in the reporting (and there's a claim they aren't related). Anyone have some better sources? I didn't follow this side of things too closely. Lowest hanging fruit was this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/sons-of-odin-hamilton-1.4152874
Yeah, hilarious alright.
I'm glad he's going to prison
Honestly I'm surprised I didn't see more stories of people trying to beat the fuck out of those truck drivers.
Slashed air lines would have been on my todo list if it was in my area.
Bags of dog shit would be landing in the rigs left and right too.
Oh man it'd be so fun giving the local kids hands-on learning in constructing and operating trebuchets and catapults. :D
Sling shots using medical hose too!
Nice to know there's one part of North America that still has good news on occasion.
Lets see how it goes next October
Oh, we're electing some greasy conservative who's never worked a day in his life, somehow convincing absolute fuckwits that he represents "the people". But we're gonna get there through a massive campaign about theatre make-up and some charity.
My heart says oh fucking no... my head says, yeah, we're fucked.
What happened to the electoral reform the liberal party promised? If they passed it, people would be able to vote for another political party while still counting their vote against the conservatives.
The Liberals wanted ranked choice, because they'd be most people's second choice and thus likely to win every future election. NDP wanted mixed-member proportional, and the Conservatives opposed changing it at all. Inertia won out, nothing changed
This is what I don’t get about the convoy and I’ve had many heated arguments with supporters that ignored this one point:
Aren’t the restrictions over now? Doesn’t that mean the lockdowns and all that were in fact a temporary measure due to an illness and not the government taking your rights and never giving it back?
Seriously!!!?? Where is the crowd that claimed we were never be allowed outside again or that we permanently lost rights?
Honestly, I think the whole conservative ideology just comes down to poor long term thinking.
It's because the protests worked!!1! they won!! Without their hard work, we would have still been stuck inside. /s
The liberal media want you to be afraid of fabricated threats of perfectly natural, harmless things with no real world consequences when we should be talking about boys kissing each other!
But he just wanted to save the children from the evil drag queens ! /S
True! I hate how drag queens are always making kids sleep in freezing cold trucks in the middle of winter and carry gas cans on their backs; using them as human shields and road blocks; making "the littles" (puke) sing and make freedom speeches "for the truckers" over their radio while their minders get shitfaced at noon on a Tuesday...
And when Canadians started asking out loud, "where tf is child services??? these kids should be in school!" the convites got a bunch of orange tshirts and Every Child Matters flags. Sneered about it on social media. Absolute filth.
Die in prison, asshole.
Feels like it took far too long, but glad it happened
At last, some good news!
It's interesting all the psychopaths who loudly identify themselves by screaming that wearing a mask is too much of an inconvenience for them to help save peoples' lives. Thanks for waving that banner so we know who you are.
“waaaaah I had to wear a mask for a little bit waaaaahhhhhh”
Lol what rights were given up?
Hint: The answer is none.
Tell me you weren't here without telling me you weren't here. Their right to protest was never in question. There is no attendant right to restrict the movements of residents leaving their homes for necessities, psychologically torture residents with blaring horns at all hours, harrass staff at restaurants and soup kitchens, and so on.
I basically had to evacuate my kid when they first rolled into the mall nearby, because screaming at a bunch of teenagers working a fucking food kiosk about mask policies (along with some lovely racial epithets to the black and indian kids) is apparently good praxis.
Once the trucks were finally cleared, no one said they had to stop protesting. Quite a few didn't, actually. I don't agree with those people, but I can respect them for a commitment to their stupid beliefs and almost willful ignorance of Canadian governmental structure when not holding residents hostage.
You want real heros? Look at the people who organized deliveries of food and necessary goods to people who couldn't get out of the core. Look at The Battle of Billing's Bridge, when we decided no one was coming to help and enough was enough. Look anywhere but the direction of this two-bit timbit terrorist.
You're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you?
Section 2?
They freely associated in downtown Ottawa.
Section 6? They freely moved from one oprovince to another, could have left Canada at any time if any country would have taken them and returned at any time with the requirement to quarantine for a few days.
Section 8?
No one was forced to be vaccinated. The tantrumists were mostly non-vaccinated while complaining about forced vaccination.
It was all fucking nonsense.
Damn, I hope you were this upset about giving up your right to not wear pants on the bus.
yuck.
TLDR: The trucker protest was really just an anti-Trudeau protest and not about COVID restrictions
Time for a brief history of trucker protest, federal/provincial jurisdictions, and international borders.
Both Canada and the US exempted unvaccinated truckers when it came to crossing borders to help mitigate supply chain issues. Eventually, both Canada and the US decided that you need to be vaccinated to enter Canada or the US. The idea of a host country gets to control who enters their country is fundamental concept of international borders.
What this meant is that US truckers would need to be vaccinated to enter Canada and vice versa. As much as people think Trudeau is all powerful dictator, he doesn't have the power to dictate to the US about their COVID restrictions.
The truckers should have protested at the US embassy or at the border to pressure the US to allow unvaccinated Canadian truckers in.
The protest morphed into general COVID restrictions. Cool, this is something that Canadian protesters can try affect change. The Constitution Act, doesn't just lay out rights and freedoms. It lays out how governments are to operate (the legislative, executive, judicial), judges, the Courts, taxation, etc.
Section 92 lays out what is under Provincial jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court in Schneider v. The Queen, 1982 CanLII 26 (SCC), [1982] 2 SCR 112 dealt with the issue of public health and Provincial jurisdiction.
Public health squarely falls into the jurisdiction of the Provinces. Great, we know who have to protest. That would be the Premiers, so let's all head down to the......Canada's capital to protest the Federal Government who doesn't have jurisdiction over public health matters outside very specific situations such as border controls and prisons.
Let's all be clear that the trucker protest really was just an anti-Trudeau protest.
No way you're this dumb. No way.
I wish you were right, but have you seen convites irl? Talked to one?
How was it tyrannical, and what rights?
Also, define the word tyrannical