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By Thomas Kika
Weekend Staff Writer
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The trial for organizers of the Canadian Freedom Convoy trucker protests is set to begin on Tuesday, prompting calls online for an uprising from users sympathetic to their situation.
The protests took place across Canada and culminated in the capital city of Ottawa last year, with truckers using their vehicles to block key traffic corridors in opposition to the country's COVID-19 safety protocols. The blockades lasted several days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country's Emergencies Act for the first time in 50 years, granting government authorities greater power to restore order.
In the weeks after, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two of the organizers who helped bring together the protests, were arrested and each charged with counts of mischief, obstructing police, counseling others to commit mischief, and intimidation. Speaking with BBC News, Joao Velloso, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said that the mischief charges, in particular, given the allegations, are "quite ordinary," but likely to take on a greater significance due to the political tensions surrounding the situation.
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In response to the start of the pair's trial, numerous conservative users took to X, the platform previously known as Twitter, to voice their support and claim that guilty verdicts would lead Canada toward an uprising, echoing rhetoric used by many Trump supporters in the U.S.
"The final decision by the trial judge will have substantive consequences for our future -if exonerated then we have hope if guilty we will have a civil uprising!!" one user, going by Concerned Canadian, wrote.
"If this corrupt regime finds Tamara Lich & Chris Barber guilty, I predict Canadians will rise up like never before. We've all had enough of the tyranny," another user wrote.
Other users sympathetic to the organizers shared posts suggesting that Canada's freedoms are at stake in the trial.
"I'll tell you what the trial of Chris Barber and Tamara Lich goes to: the heart of Canada as a nation," another user wrote. "Do we survive and protect fundamental freedoms, or do we succumb and destroy the liberties that Canadians laid down their lives for?"
Newsweek reached out to other organizers and legal experts via email for further comment.
The trial is set to take place over the next 13 days, with another six days set aside in October. Another protest organizer, Pat King, will face a separate trial in November. Lich and Barber, along with other organizers, are also facing a civil suit from Ottawa residents over the disruptions the convoy caused in the city.
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