Inquiry hears many motivations of ‘Freedom Convoy’ leadership
Freedom, politics, control, money all played role
Months before thousands of protesters rolled into Canada’s capital with the “Freedom Convoy,” gridlocking streets in protest of COVID-19 mandates, Canada Unity founder James Bauder had already staged a similar, but much smaller, protest in Ottawa.
Bauder’s mini-convoy of fewer than 100 protesters, called the “Convoy for Freedom,” arrived in October 2021 to flout public health rules in stores and restaurants and blockade streets in front of the prime minister and governor general’s residences.
On Thursday, he told the commission investigating the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act that he delivered a “memorandum of understanding” to the Senate and the Governor General on that trip. His hope was that they would agree to work with his group to overthrow COVID-19 measures and ask the prime minister to step down for “committing treason and crimes against humanity.”
“Had thousands vs. hundreds shown up we would still be there and most likely the MOU would have gotten the much-needed pressure tactic we were seeking,” Bauder wrote to supporters on his Facebook page in December.
Only a few weeks later, he was working with a loose group of organizers who had never met one another to bring a much larger crowd of protesters to Ottawa, Bauder told the public inquiry.
Overpowering the authority of the elected government was just one of the disparate goals of the demonstrators, the inquiry has heard during a week of testimony from convoy organizers.
They have said that some of the participants wanted to be heard, while others were looking for a larger platform, and others still wanted to get their hands on the millions of dollars donated to support the cause.
Brendan Miller, a lawyer who represents some of the convoy organizers at the hearings, said Canada Unity has never called for any form of violence and never called to violently throw overthrow the government of Canada.
Several of the other organizers have testified that they did not ascribe to Bauder’s memorandum, though at least one organizer signed it.
It wasn’t the only example where convoy organizers were unaligned in their motives.
Another of the protest’s spokespeople, Benjamin Dichter, told the commission earlier Thursday that even the lawyer representing a core group of organizers appeared to have his own agenda.
“There were many different groups, right? It wasn’t just one group, and every different group had their own idea,” he said, though he added that they all agreed on ending COVID-19 mandates.
Tamara Lich, who is perhaps the most recognizable of the organizers, told the inquiry late Thursday that she joined the “Freedom Convoy” after failing to get a response from members of Parliament she emailed about ending COVID-19 restrictions.
“I was growing increasingly alarmed with the mandates and the harm that I was seeing the mandates inflict on Canadians,” she said.