Lawfare Never Ends -- Crown to Appeal Coutts Two Acquittal

Is this injustice a last ditch effort to shore up Trudeau's justification for his use of the Emergencies Act?

After spending over two years — some 900 days in custody — though they had not yet been convicted of any crime, the remaining members of the Coutts Four, the Coutts Two – Chris Carbert and Tony Olienick – were finally exonerated and vindicated. On August 2, 2024, a jury in Lethbridge, Alberta, rendered its verdict finding both men – NOT GUILTY of conspiracy to commit murder of police (RCMP). For what should have been a major news story, for a major trial that has been almost three years in the making there were few members of the mainstream media there to hear it.

Yet, this verdict was not just a vindication these men and a condemnation of the hell they were put through for over two years, it lays further to waste Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s increasingly flimsy justification for invoking the Emergencies Act on the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. The Trudeau government maintained that it was the arrests of these men and two others, at the Coutts border blockade protest*, on this serious charge of conspiracy to kill police, that was the catalyst for invoking the Act. A move that gave the government unlimited powers to unleash riot police to violently crush a peaceful protest and further punish many protest participants by freezing their bank accounts. Perhaps that is why so few of the mainstream media, who are financially propped up by the Trudeau regime through more than generous subsidies, were not there to hear it.

*Coutts Border Blockade protest was an offshoot on the Freedom Convoy protest. Both were protesting the draconian COVID 19 mandates and restrictions imposed by governments in February of 2022.

This acquittal calls the Trudeau government’s justification for invoking the Act into even further question given that a Federal Court, earlier this year, ruled that Trudeau’s use of the Act was unjustified, illegal and unconstitutional.

So it should come as no surprise that, just as the Trudeau government announced it would be appeal that Federal Court ruling less than 20 minutes after it received the decision, the Crown prosecutor on the Coutts case, less than 20 days following the the jury’s decision to acquit these men, has indicated it will appeal the jury’s not guilty verdict. It does leave one to wonder if this move is due to the fact that a not guilty verdict completely undercuts the Trudeau government’s pretext for invoking the Act.

Chris Carbert and Tony Olienick not guilty of conspiracy to murder police.

Despite its political ramifications, the verdict, while extinguishing the possibility of both men facing life in prison, is bittersweet, not only because of the pending appeal, but also because they were still found guilty of mischief over $5000 and possession of weapons for dangerous purposes, and for Olienick, illegal possession of explosives.

While supporters had hoped that sentencing for those convictions would be the time served* in remand and that Olienick and Carbert will soon be free at last, that hope too, was short lived, as the Crown sought and received court time for a lengthy bail hearing, making it clear that time served would not be enough to satisfy the state’s need to further punish these men—thus both men still remain behind bars. So again, the hope that they would soon be able to put a long and very painful ordeal behind them and work to put their lives back together has once again been snuffed out, along with the two years of their lives that they will never get back.

*In recognition of the harsher conditions prisoners face in remand centres, one day in custody in a remand centre for sentencing purposed counts for 1.5 days. If further harsh treatments can be proven further time may be equated into ‘time served’.

This Crown Attorney, Stephen Johnston, just can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that despite his monumental efforts to convince the jury of his absurd tale that Carbert and Olinick were part of some nefarious group involved in a plot to overthrow the government and kill cops, they just didn’t buy it.

Nor did the jury find the testimonies of a trio of female undercover RCMP officers who took the stand to prop up this absurdity to be trustworthy. Perhaps because the testimonies from these undercover cops who had infiltrated the protest were based simply on their personal recollections rather than hard evidence. Why is that? Because, by their own admission, these undercover cops, who on any other assignment would wear wires to collect such evidence, were not equipped with wires while infiltrating the protest. Thus they had no recorded evidence of the conversations they had with the men. On top of that they were not able to explain why they weren’t wired. So, essentially their testimonies amounted to nothing more than hearsay.

The jury also did not believe Johnston’s contention that these two men were somehow planning to use the Coutts protest as a ‘launch pad’ to murder the veritable army of RCMP officers that descended on the protest site in early February. And descend they did as Daryl Yorgason a defence witness had who attended the protest told the Lethbridge court. He said that the police presence at the blockade was so overwhelming and intimidating he decided to leave. "I observed helicopters and drones. It looked like a scene out of a movie — a full military program coming at me. On foot, there was probably 30 or 40 RCMP in full riot gear."

A very heavy police presence at the Coutts border protest.

As was also pointed out by their lawyers in their final arguments, the two men hardly knew each other, let alone somehow joined forces and conspired to bring about some kind of revolution that involved killing police and toppling the government. In reality it could hardly even be called a conspiracy, because the same Crown Attorney, Johnston, had dropped the conspiracy charges against their alleged co-conspirators — Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak — some four months back. They were released from custody after spending just a week shy of two years in remand custody. Charges of mischief over $5000 and possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes were also dropped. Instead the men plead guilty to minor gun related charges that were not even part of the original indictment and which would have meant a fine or probation, but certainly not the two years they spent in remand custody.

Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak

Beyond punching serious holes in the Trudeau government’s contention that the Coutts ‘situation’ was the basis for its use of the Emergencies Act the list of questions, quandries and conundrums in this farcical series of unfortunate events is a long one and if the appeal proceeds the list can only get longer. With the overriding theme of a gross miscarriage of justice, areas that require examination and investigation include the question of media complicity and bias in the nature of reporting on the case — possible police and government corruption, coercion and incompetence — allegations of prosecutorial misconduct — and the very real abuse of authority and power by both the police, and the corrections and justice system. Now with the prospect of a potential appeal of this case, and therefore the possibility of a new trial the chances that any of these questions will ever be answered in the coming months or even years remains a question in itself. And this gives rise to another issue and question… is justice delayed justice denied, because this case is the poster child for this age old adage.

Still, the questions remain, and Canadians deserve, and perhaps someday will actually demand answers.

To begin with, why was there so much dishonesty and duplicity on the part of the media throughout this case, and continuing right up until now? 

Why is it that what should have been a major story about injustices carried out by the state on four men who were essentially assumed guilty on what were always questionable charges – based on equally questionable evidence – completely ignored, not just by mainstream media, but even independent media? This included True North Media, the Western Standard and Rebel News*; organizations who often claim they are there to tell the news the mainstream media won’t report on.

*Rebel News continuously gave credence to the possible guilt of the Coutts Four and the reasons for their denial of bail and until the release of Morin and Lysak following a plea deal. That development resulted in Ezra Levant, the face of Rebel News, reevaluating its previous position on the matter and questioning the state’s case against them. The case and trial has since been very well covered by Rebel News Reporter Robert Kraychik.

The bias, laziness and downright dishonesty and duplicity of the Canadian media in propping up the government’s, the Crown’s and the RCMP’s narrative on this entire matter has been both shocking and disgusting. It began with the arrests of the men and has continued throughout their trial right up to the not guilty verdict delivered by the jury. The media’s initial coverage assumed the guilt of the four men from the outset.

This type of reporting — in taking what the RCMP say as gospel — raises another question. Since when do media in this country take the RCMP at its word when it is investigating a controversial case and don’t question or scrutinize elements of its investigation, the veracity of its evidence or the very motives driving the investigation?

Yet this is what happened in the case of the Coutts Four. 

As I said this bias, laziness and dishonesty by the media continues to this very day — underscored by this piece titled ‘What the mixed verdict in the Coutts Freedom Convoy blockade trial really means’ written by apparently an award winning journalist Adrian Humphreys, published in the National Post on August 24, 2024.

There is so much wrong with this piece that it requires another article on its own. Simply look at the sub-headline — focusing on guns, doomsday culture, anti-government messaging and you get the picture. Of course it also mentions the mythical Diagolon connection. To top if all off, the final piece of the article, while seeming to forget all four men were exonerated of the conspiracy charges ponders why they weren’t charged with terrorism!!

But let’s get back to the equally biased and bad reporting at the time of the men’s arrest and thereafter. When the four men were denied bail, not a single member of the media questioned why, particularly given that under the bail reforms introduced by the Trudeau government even accused murderers receive bail – yet these men were denied it. Only the Epoch Times penned a piece on the subject.

None had criminal records, all had supportive families, three were fathers and all were gainfully employed; some even owned their own businesses. Given these factors they could hardly be considered a flight risk or a danger, yet bail was denied them time and again.

During their time in custody they endured conditions which should have shocked most Canadians. This included periods in solitary confinement, strip searches, substandard medical care, substandard food, a complete disregard for their mental health, and no attempts to provide them exercise or recreational facilities or activities that inmates in actual prisons would have ready access too. Yet none of this was ever questioned or investigated by the media. Not a single media outlet thought that such harsh treatment of Canadian citizens – yet to be found guilty of any crime – by the justice and corrections systems was worth shining a light on. 

Even now, as the not guilty verdict has been rendered on the most serious charge — conspiracy to kill police — media outlets like the CBC and the Canadian Press (CP) still can’t can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that after two long years of being slandered as members of some ‘far-right’ extremist group hellbent on killing cops and taking down the government – a jury didn’t buy their media spin, nor that of the Crown, the RCMP or the government. The not guilty verdict was rendered despite accusations from the Crown that they were part of what the then presiding RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, described to former Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino as: “A hardened cell of individuals armed to the teeth who possessed a willingness to do down with the cause.” Mendicino went on to add the following unsubstantiated accusations, none of which were even remotely close to the truth:

"The dangerous criminal activity occurring away from the TV cameras and social-media posts was real and organized. It could have been deadly for citizens, protesters and officers. We need to be clear-eyed about the seriousness of these incidents and indeed, several of the individuals at Coutts have strong ties to a far-right extreme organization with leaders who are in Ottawa."

This statement made by Mendicino was a devious attempt by the Trudeau government to form a tenuous connection between Coutts and the Ottawa protest in order to clear the way for its planned use of the Emergencies Act which was already in the works. The Coutts verdict, as it now stands, and the Federal Court ruling which also indicated that invoking the Act was not needed given the Coutts ‘situation’ had been ‘resolved’ by the time the Act was invoked — has been shown to be nothing but a pack of lies.

Former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki and Former Liberal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino.

These statements and allegations by Lucki and Mendicino bring up other questions… such as:

Was this entire case, regarding the conspiracy charge simply a monumentally gross intelligence and investigative failure on the part of the RCMP? Or rather, was it a case of Canada’s ‘independent’ federal police force being coerced, corrupted and co opted by the Trudeau government to do its bidding in finding a viable reason for it to invoke the Emergencies Act on the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa?

Were these men kept in custody and denied bail because the Trudeau government used their arrests justify invoking the Emergencies Act. And if that is the case, does that make these men political prisoners as posited by fellow substacker Gord Magill in this Newsweek article? Yet, again, not a single member of the mainstream media tried to connect these dots and ask some serious questions on the subject and neither have any explored that possibility in light of this verdict.

And perhaps this is why the mainstream media has reported on the jury’s finding in the manner it has. They couldn’t resist recapping how the jury heard ‘statements’ and text messages from the ‘accused’ warning that the blockade was the ‘last stand against a tyrannical federal government’. In their reports on the verdict they highlighted the text messages Carbert sent to his mother where he called the police ‘losers’ and ‘the enemy’, adding that he’d equated the blockade to a war and told his mother that if the police came in and they lost the fight, he would likely die in wider conflict.

When it came to Olienick media reports recapped how he told the undercover cops that if the blockade was lost, the next step might be an invasion from United Nations troops, and that if the police tried to storm the barricade he would, ‘slit their throats’. Again, in these reports, no mention was made of the fact that this statement came from the cop’s recollections and conjecture, and not from an actual tape recording of Olienick expressing such sentiments.

It seemed the media was trying to make the case that even though the jury found these men innocent of conspiring to kill police, there was still good reasons for the charge to have been laid, and to be pursued by the Crown with a vengeance that, quite frankly, has bordered on the psychotic. And Johnston’s quick decision to appeal this verdict, which came from a jury, only reinforces his obsessive mindset on the matter.

The media also couldn’t be bothered to mention that Carbert and Olienick had already spent over two years behind bars before their trial even began. Nor did they think it might be noteworthy to mention that the reason these men were denied bail for over two years was solely due to the charge from which they had just been acquitted! None of that seemed to be important. And a Google search of media reports also reveals that not a single media outlet has written any editorial comments or opinion pieces on the ordeal these men endured due to the implied seriousness of a charge on which they have now been acquitted, save for the a piece in the Western Standard which I would describe as tepid at best in terms of its demand for accountability.

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/editorial-900-days-and-innocent-a-full-public-inquiry-is-needed-for-coutts/56767

Then there is the matter of accusations of possible prosecutorial misconduct against the lead Crown prosecutor in this case, Johnston. This issue arose during the early stages of the pretrial for all four men back in July of 2023. It would seem that the Crown, in providing disclosure evidence to the defence had, either by accident or oversight, neglected to redact a portion of that evidence. In other words the Crown had inadvertently given the defence some material it had not wanted the defence to see. Upon receipt of that material the defence accused Johnston of having given false and illegal instructions to the police leading up to the arrest of the men, adding that the Crown had improperly instructed the police. The word fraud also came up when the defence demanded that the information it had received and any further information and communications between the Crown and the RCMP regarding the arrests be released as it was germane to their case.

What followed after that remains a mystery, primarily due to publication bans. The Crown claimed the information was protected by solicitor-client privilege, and thus the material was placed in a sealed envelope and left with the judge presiding over the case to determine whether it should be released, and thus the envelope remains sealed. It was also at this juncture in the trial that Johnston and his co-counsel were recused, yet, somehow, with little explanation, both eventually eventually returned to continue to prosecute the case. So the question remains, what is in that envelope and just how damning were the accusations against Johnston?

Well, independent journalist Mocha Bezrigan, who was essentially the only reporter covering the Coutts trial at the time attended the pretrial proceedings when arguments around the contents of that envelope were again rehashed in November of 2023. In the aftermath of those proceedings he posted the following statement on X: "I’m in the courtroom of the Coutts Four right now, and the things that are taking place would be in the magnitude of a bombshell in the political arena, but I can’t report on it like I’d have been able to during July’s pretrial due to the automatic ban."

Monumental intelligence failure or fabrication.. what happened to Diagolon?

Much of the initial reporting, by the media on the arrest and charging of these men centred on their purported association with something called Diagolon, which mainstream media went all in on, describing it as a far right accelerationist, neo-facist and even a terrorist group—therefore characterizing these men in the same way. The media, in those reports, relied almost exclusively on the ‘intelligence and assessments’ of Diagolon by the Canadian Anti Hate Network (CAHN), which is a left-leaning organization that openly prides itself in only ‘investigating’ what it deems are right wing organizations. It also receives considerable funding from the Trudeau government.

The RCMP also made claims that the men were somehow ‘members’ or associated Diagolon. Yet its own intelligence analysts did not even have a clear definition of what Diagolon was.

In fact, those assessments even questioned the veracity of the extremist claims CAHN had made about Diagolon.

The copies of these RCMP intelligence assessments were taken from the Hate-Gate report prepared by Toronto lawyer Caryma Sa’d and Elisa Hategan a former member of CAHN who obtained them through access to information requests. The Hate-Gate report was another newsworthy item regarding the Coutts saga that the mainstream media completely ignored.

In fact, Diagolon, as it was explained in the Hate-Gate report, was nothing more the product of a podcast created by Afghan war veteran Jeremy Mackenize called, ‘The Raging Dissident’. McKenzie had created it as a meme, for entertainment purposes, for his followers and to promote his podcast. While his podcast, which could be described as theatrical and boisterous, and highly critical of the current government, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the RCMP, it was by no means violent, nor did it bear any resemblance to any type of accelerationist movement or terrorist organization, again as RCMP intelligence assessment had already concluded. During the Public Order Emergencies Commission (POEC) Inquiry Mackenize was called to testify and even under cross-examination he was able to dismantle most of the erroneous claims CAHN had made about Diagolon.

So it is hardly surprising that during the trial of Carbert and Olienick the name Dialogon was barely whispered by the Crown. All the hyberbolic nonsense about it being a terrorist organization and that these men were associated with it, burst like a balloon full of too much hot air — because that is what it was.

Now, this verdict for Carbert and Olienick, together with the dropping of the conspiracy charges against Morin and Lysak have blown apart the whole absurd notion that these men were involved in ‘Diagolon, and that their arrests and the ‘discovery’ of this so called ‘murder’ plot made it necessary for the Trudeau government to invoke the Emergencies Act and declare Martial Law across the entire country. Yet, POEC Commissioner, Liberal appointee Justice Paul Rouleau, still referenced Diagolon, and this tenuous connection to the Coutts men, as a key element in his finding that the Trudeau government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act.

In one of the articles that I penned back in October of 2023, as part of the Coutts Four Chronicles, I asked if the justification for the use of Emergencies Act by the POEC and therefore the Trudeau government was a house of cards — pointing to the conflicting intelligence reports, tenuous connections and serendipitous coincidences surrounding that justification. I asked what if the removal or changing of a single card could bring down the entire house, and what if that card could be the Coutts Four?

And so the question remains, with all four men exonerated of the conspiracy charge, is this the card that will cause the house upon which the invocation of the Emergencies Act rests to fall? And is this why the Crown, who lost the case on that very important charge, is now appealing the not guilty verdict? In the meantime, two men, now exonerated of that charge, who should be free men, given that bail was only denied them due the seriousness of the conspiracy charge, are still behind bars. Why is that? Yet another question around this very mysterious case around the Coutts Four that has yet to be answered.

The National Post article that I mentioned earlier begins by stating that “There will be a place in Canada’s history books for the divisive and dramatic blockade at Coutts.” It then goes onto say, “Just how future historian might view the Coutt protest — the people , the weapons, the doomsday last-stand… is anyone’s guess. I suspect the author thinks the protest will be viewed in very dark terms. So do I, but not for the actions of the protesters as the author seems to think. But rather, for the actions of the police, the governments and the courts, against all the protesters, and in particular, for the terrible injustices the Coutts Four suffered and endured in its aftermath, and how they were used as pawns to justify the Trudeau governments invocation of the Emergencies Act.