“The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime,” wrote Arthur White-Crummey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last week, “as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.”
The “Ottawa truck convoy” is what they are calling the big anti-totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare.
“Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber,” we learn, and if you raise your eyebrows over such stiff sentences — for “mischief” cases! — you’re not alone. Chris Barber’s lawyer called the prosecutor’s demanded punishment, “cruel and unusual.”
The exact charges against the two convoy leaders are “mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order” (Barber) and “mischief alone” (Lich). The prosecutor argued that these people did a lot of damage.
But it wasn’t property damage, or burning buildings, or even littering. The convoys stalled traffic around government buildings and made a lot of noise — and Barber is acknowledged by the prosecutor to have worked with police to move trucks out of residential areas.
Barber and Lich wanted a clean and pointed protest.
Barber’s lawyer noted that the organizers and hooligans of the “Black Bloc” protesters at Toronto’s 2010 G20 summit “caused extensive property damage, including upending police cars and smashing storefronts, but received comparatively light sentences of under two years.”
And remember, even the CBC article used the word “unprecedented.”
Traditionally, however, a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful.
Tyrannical governments.
So we now know how to categorize the Canadian government.
Very precedented.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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