Coutts Three Sentencing -- Weighing the Balance of Justice

Do we have an equal balance when it comes to the Freedom Convoy?

On January 10, 2025, two of the men who made up what became known as the ‘Coutts Three’ stood in an Alberta courtroom to hear their sentences for their participation in the Coutts Border Blockade protest that occurred in February of 2022. All three men were tried and found guilty of the charge of mischief over $5000 by a jury of their peers in April of 2023, more than two years after the protest took place.

It was in the small border town of Coutts, Alberta that huge numbers of Albertans gathered to effect a blockade at the highway border crossing between the US and Canada to express their opposition to the two years worth of draconian and useless COVID 10 mandates and restrictions they had endured; imposed on them by their governments.

Van Huigenbos receive a four month jail sentence, Janzen received a three month sentence to be served in the community.

Marco Van Huigenbos was sentenced to four months in prison and Gerhard (George) Janzen received a three-month sentence to be served in the community with an order to complete 100 hours of community service by the end of his sentence. The Crown Prosecutor Stephen Johnson had been asking for nine months of jail for Huigenbos and six months for Janzen. He pushed for a longer sentence for Van Huigenbos be maintaining that he had a greater leadership profile and therefore should get more jail time. Some may say that they got off easy given that the maximum sentence for a mischief over over $5000 charge is ten years in prison. Others may disagree given the stress it has put them and their families as they had to obtain legal counsel and try to pay for it, awaited a trial and a conviction and then had to wait months for their sentencing with a possible jail term hanging over their heads.

Alex Van Herk, who is the remaining member of the Coutts Three, had fired his legal counsel prior to the sentencing hearing. Given his situation the judge gave him 30 days to obtain new legal representation prior to his sentencing.

The trial that led to the conviction of the three men back in April of last year took almost two a half weeks. At the outset of the case the lead Crown prosecutor Stephen Johnson told the jury he intended to prove that the men who were on trial were the leaders that spearheaded the month-long protest – hence their guilt. Despite his best efforts Johnson did not prove that, 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 just the fact that they were at the protest was evidence enough of their guilt.

Apparently the jury took him at his word and rendered a guilty verdict. The reason the men were tagged as ‘leaders’ and charged with mischief over $5000 some months after the protest was shut down, it would seem, was because they chose to cooperate with police at the protest site and serve as a liaison between them and the protesters in an effort to keep the lines of communication open and ensure the protest remained peaceful. Nobody had really organized the protest, as it was more of a grassroots phenomenon sparked, to some degree, by the Freedom Convoy’s arrival in downtown Ottawa, also protesting government imposed COVID 19 mandates and restrictions.

But, onto the sentencing – I have to say, I found a fair bit of irony in the words the presiding Judge Keith Yamauchi used in passing sentences on Van Huigenbos and Janzen telling them how the illegal blockade at the border had “affected the lives of many Canadians”. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the men had joined the protest because they were extremely concerned about how the unending COVID restrictions – the extended lock downs, the business closures, the stay at home orders, the church and school closures and the rigid enforcement of mask and vaccine mandates were negatively affecting the lives of Albertans and all Canadians, for that matter.

People had lost their jobs and businesses, children were feeling isolated due to school closures, many people were suffering from depression and some had even contemplated or actually committed suicides – meanwhile ministers had been jailed for holding church services and people were being arrested for breaching even minor COVID dictates. The even greater irony is that we have since learned that all these actions did little, if anything to control the spread of a virus that really only severely impacted a very small part of the population – the very old and people suffering from serious medical conditions. Yet, he went on to tell them, therefore, we must “make it clear that the majority of Canadians denounce their actions.” Really? Did the judge take a poll, does he really know if the majority of Canadians were really against these men protesting COVID restrictions? Particularly given what they have since learned – that the vaccines many were mandated to take were largely ineffective, as were the damaging lock downs

Yamauchi went on to say that, “The protesters and offenders thought they had a legitimate cause. They undertook the vigilante approach of taking over Highway 4 until their demands were met. This is a significant case of mischief and a period of incarceration is warranted.” So apparently the judge did not deem their protest a legitimate cause, and that only the protesters thought it was legitimate. Perhaps Yamauchi had forgotten or maybe never noticed that the end result of these protests was the actual lifting of many of the damaging mandates they had been protesting by governments.

Johnson, in his attempt to get the sentences he wanted, said in his submission; “Politically motivated crime always is a calculated decision … We don’t change our governments in this country through criminal acts.” The first point that one should make regarding Johnson’s assertion is the protesters were not demanding a change in government. They were telling the current government that their draconian COVID mandates were hurting people more than they were helping and that is was time to remove them. And what choice do citizens have when governments are dangerously overreaching and seriously infringing on peoples rights and freedoms? What can people do to make their voices heard when governments appear deaf to them, other doing something to get their attention?

Regardless of what the judge or the Crown thought or didn’t think, their statements make me wonder why the protesters who disrupted and backed up traffic at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Windsor, Ontario aren’t facing prison sentences or serious charges. The Ambassador Bridge was and is, by far, a more important border crossing, in terms of the economic impact it had on Canada and Canadians? Transport Canada estimated that the Ambassador Bridge blockade halted $3.9 billion in trade activity at the Ambassador Bridge. Was that protest also not a ‘significant case of mischief’ that should warrant a period of incarceration for those involved? Yet it did not.

While charges were laid against quite a number of protesters at the Ambassador Bridge, most have since either been withdrawn or quietly settled through alternative means – in some cases by those involved agreeing to make a donation to a local charity in lieu of the charge. Even the charges against the ‘alleged’ leaders of the Ambassador Bridge protest William Laframboise and Nycole Dicredico were eventually withdrawn. Both had been charged with mischief against property – not mischief over $5000 which was what the Coutts Three had been charged with. Laframbois did endure a near two-year legal battle before his charge was withdrawn in March of 2024 – however he never went to trial. The charge against Dicredico was dropped in November of 2022. Laframboise is somewhat perturbed as to why it took the Crown two years to drop the charge, given that the evidence, or lack thereof, never changed. Nevertheless he was relieved to have it over with.

Both protests also ended peacefully. As a matter of fact when Van Huigenbos was told of the arrests and charges that had been laid against a number of protest participants at Coutts, as a result of a series of RCMP raids, he advised protesters of the situation and told them it was time to shut the protest down and for everyone to go home. And the protest ended without incident. Yet, he is now going to jail.

My point in all this and bringing up the Ambassador Bridge protest is – isn’t justice in Canada supposed to be seen as fair and meted out evenly? So why the difference in these two protests. In Coutts, there was the situation of the other serious charges being laid against other protest participants in Coutts – but that was a separate matter that did not involve the vast majority of people who come to the protest. I have no answer to this question. Perhaps it is because the Crown Prosecutor in Windsor wasn’t a zealous in pursuing prosecutions against the Ambassador Bridge protesters as Stephen Johnson in Alberta, who has prosecuted numerous Coutts protesters with a vengeance.

However, it does seem odd that the people participating in the Alberta protest, who had been dubiously ‘dubbed’, but were found not to be leaders, are receiving jail sentences after a lengthy trial. Yet, the Windsor protest ‘leaders’ saw their charges, which were lesser charges, dropped and received no penalty for participating in what was obviously an equally or perhaps even more disruptive protest given the important of the Ambassador Bridge border crossing. But there is a common thread here. It would seem is that in both cases, the ‘leaders’ were zeroed in on. Yet, in both cases those charged for their ‘leadership’ roles repeatedly said they did not play a role in organizing or leading the protests. Lafranoise and Dicredico, didn’t really even know each other and both weren’t charged for their so-called leadership roles until July of 2022, almost six months after the protest. The Coutts Three were also not charged until months after the blockade protest had ended. And of course there are Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, still awaiting to hear their sentence coming down in March of 2022, for their roles as ‘leaders’ in the Ottawa Freedom Convoy protest.

It would seem, either police, the Crown Attorneys or some faceless entity among the powers that be, seem intent on creating or conjuring up protest leaders and then punishing them for their leadership roles when it comes to those associated with the Freedom Convoy. And to make another comparison, it is interesting that with Pro-Palestinian - Pro-Hamas protests that have been going on in streets across Canada for well over a year with some of them becoming violent and destructive, many threatening and spewing hateful rhetoric about Jews, and calling for the end of Israel and even Canada. No leaders have been rounded up for prosecution in those protests. Why is that, one might ask, but is unlikely to get an answer.

Smoke bombs used and windows smashed at pro-Palestinian protest in Montreal during NATO summit.