Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the news once again, this time for officially announcing his “resignation.”
What most Americans missed is that Trudeau is still the prime minister; his resignation doesn’t take effect until a new leader for the Liberal Party of Canada is chosen in late March.
The message Trudeau wants to send is clear: Oppose me and I can put you away for 10 years.
In the meantime, Trudeau has “prorogued” Parliament, a move that halts all accountability for anything he might do in the interim from Canada’s feckless opposition Conservative Party, who have been stymied in several attempts to remove him through non-confidence motions.
How convenient.
Especially as Trudeau continues to destroy innocent lives with what will be one of his legacy achievements: the vicious persecution of the trucker protesters.
The latest victim
Friday, January 10, the latest victim, 34-year-old father of four and former Fort Macleod, Alberta, town councilor Marco Van Huigenbos was sentenced to four months in prison.
His crime? Acting as a peaceful liaison between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the group blockading the crossing of the Coutts, Alberta, border with Montana in protest of Trudeau’s COVID mandates. The RCMP were monitoring the crossing for the duration of the protest.
Another man charged in the same case, George Janzen, received a 90-day sentence, to be “served in the community.” A third man, Alex Van Herk, has yet to face sentencing due to firing his legal counsel.
Van Huigenbos, Janzen, and Van Herk have become known as the Coutts Trio.
The Coutts Four
They are not to be confused with another group of political prisoners downstream of this same protest, the Coutts Four, recently found not guilty of the heinous and fantastical charge of “conspiring to murder police officers.”
This charge allowed Canada’s heavily politicized judicial system — 77% of whose members are appointees of Trudeau’s party — to deny these men bail and incarcerate them for over two years before the trial began, despite none of them having a history of violence or criminal record.
Two of the four, Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert, remain in prison to this day for other charges. Strangely enough, the judge informed them of their sentences in a two-hour diatribe largely focused on the charge for which they were just found not guilty.
Judicial mischief
But back to the Coutts Trio. Just what were they charged with?
“Mischief.” Under Canadian law, this deceptively benign-sounding charge, centered on crimes against property, can bring up to ten years in prison.
The Trudeau regime has been charging anyone and everyone involved with the largest peaceful protest in the nation’s history with “mischief” explicitly because of the broad interpretations it has been given in case law.
The message he wants to send is clear: Oppose me and I can put you away for 10 years.
In Stalinist Russa, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” this was so common that they had a phrase for it: copping a tenner.
No case? No problem
The trial of Van Huigenbos, Van Herk, and Janzen, like that of prominent Freedom Convoy “leaders” Chris Barber and Tamara Lich, was a farce, with literally nothing in the way of evidence that the men had engaged in any wrongdoing whatsoever.
Crown Prosecutor Stephen Johnson made his intent clear from the start: to prove that the men on trial were leaders of a revolutionary movement.
He face a crucial obstacle: The Coutts protest, much like those in Ottawa and other locations across Canada, was spontaneously organized and didn’t have leaders as such. And so Johnson focused on Van Huigenbos’ well-intentioned efforts to mediate between protesters and police as “leadership.”
Despite his best efforts to prove Van Huigenbos guilty of mischief, Johnson did not prove any of the charges and actually admitted it in his final arguments. He then told the jury he really didn’t have to prove they were leaders for the jury to find them guilty, because the fact that they were present at the protest was good enough to convict them.
The jury apparently agreed.
Nice knowing you
As Trudeau takes to American cable news for his carefully managed farewell tour, you won’t hear any mention of the Coutts Trio. They, like Trudeau’s grossly inept, authoritarian mismanagement of COVID, have been memory-holed.
Nor will you hear of Trudeau’s disastrous policies around immigration and homelessness, or of the incalculable damage he’s done to Canada’s economy, social fabric, and reputation.
Meanwhile, Mark Carney recently announced his candidacy to replace Trudeau on Jon Stewart’s show. The former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England kept a straight face as he claimed to be a political outsider.
Clearly both men are more concerned with appealing to American elites than to their own people. This should give you some idea of the likelihood of Trudeau ever facing justice for his many crimes against Canada.
Freedom convoy, Trucker convoy, Trucker protester, Coutts trio, Coutts four, Justin trudeau, Mark carney, Gord magill, Letter from canada
