OP-ED: The persecution of Canada’s “other” Freedom Convoy truckers

"On September 8, three and a half years after the 2022 Freedom Convoy departed Ottawa, and five long, stressful months after his trial actually ended, Robert Dinel walked out of court a free man."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Author: Donna Laframboise

On September 8, three and a half years after the 2022 Freedom Convoy departed Ottawa, and five long, stressful months after his trial actually ended, Robert Dinel walked out of court a free man.

Dinel, a Quebec heavy equipment operator who’d behaved entirely peacefully during the protest over Covid restrictions, had been charged with mischief and obstruction of police. Court proceedings were repeatedly delayed — four times alone just this year — until judge Matthew Webber of the Ontario Court of Justice finally stayed the charges on the grounds that Dinel’s Charter rights to a timely trial had been violated.

For Dinel, it was a relief. For Canadians concerned about freedom and justice, his legal ordeal was yet another example of a system gone off the rails.

Most Canadians are aware of the trials of convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, which ended in conviction; they are to be sentenced in October. Few may realize that many more protestors were charged, most for the relatively innocuous infraction of mischief, and have had their cases drag on and on through the courts for more than three years.

The record of Canada’s legal system clearly shows that mischief charges are routinely withdrawn before scarce and expensive court time is expended on relative trivialities. But when it comes to the truckers, the Crown attorneys at the Ottawa courthouse – employees of the Government of Ontario, not the federal government – appear to have lost all perspective. They are on a mission. The sheer intensity of the prosecution of Convoy members looks less like the fair administration of justice than revenge upon people who dared protest the arbitrary and oppressive measures of the Covid years.

The initial police crackdown itself was a mess. Those arrested were passed from police officer to police officer. Officials writing up the paperwork had no direct knowledge of what had actually transpired; extra charges appear to have been tacked on willy nilly. In Dinel’s case, the prosecution doesn’t even know the identity of the tactical officer who pointed a gun at his head and hauled him out of his vehicle on February 18, 2022.

In a police processing trailer four hours after his arrest, Dinel received a medical assessment from a paramedic. Seated and hand-cuffed throughout, the five-foot-three Dinel calmly and repeatedly told police he was in no fit state to be making decisions and that he wanted to speak to a lawyer. “I want to know what I’m signing,” he insisted. But the police officers, who outnumbered him ten-to-one, kept pushing him to sign an undertaking that he wouldn’t return to the protest area. The fact he never got his phone call – that he was denied his Charter right “to retain and instruct [legal] counsel without delay” – should have stopped this case in its tracks. The Crown chose to pursue it, anyway.

A week after Dinel’s mother died in July 2023, he suffered the first of four strokes. In December 2023, one occurred in the courtroom. “My whole face just seized up,” he recalls. “I had another stroke. My whole face drooped, then the judge freaked right out.” An ambulance was summoned and his trial was adjourned. “I hate court,” says Dinel. “It’s hard, you know. It’s stressful, it’s exhausting.” Rather than staying the charges on compassionate grounds, the prosecution continued, with Dinel accompanied by a service dog.

Nova Scotia trucker Guy Meister spent hours in the same paddy wagon as Dinel the day they were arrested. After travelling from his Nova Scotia home to Ottawa for court appearances more than a dozen times – at considerable expense – in May of this year Meister was found guilty of mischief, but not of obstructing police. In late July, he was sentenced to 20 hours of community service, six months’ probation, and ordered to pay a $100 victim surcharge.

The trial for Windsor, Ontario trucker Csaba Vizi began just this month, the same day Robert Dinel’s charges were stayed. Video broadcast around the world in February 2022 shows him being assaulted by multiple police officers after he’d exited his truck and knelt down in the snow with his hands behind his head. None of those officers were themselves charged following this violence. None were forced to raise tens of thousands in lawyers’ fees, as Vizi has.

Even protesters who have endured the stress of a trial and been acquitted have still not always walked free and clear, because the Crown has often insisted on filing appeals. As a result, defence lawyers routinely advise Freedom Convoy protesters that their legal nightmare isn’t actually over until an additional 30 days have come and gone. In one instance, the Crown waited until the last afternoon of the last permissible day to file its appeal.

These are just a few examples of what’s been going on in Canada’s justice system, one already beset by long delays for cases involving far more serious crimes. Credible news reports suggest that the majority of criminal cases in Ontario aren’t even making it to trial, with sexual assault charges dropped because of delays. Yet the Convoy prosecutions continue.

Many people insist Covid is over, that we should all move on. But the legal persecution of the truckers who bravely protested government overreach in the bitter winter of early 2022 is far from over.

Donna Laframboise is an independent journalist and photographer. A former vice-president of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, she is the author of Thank You, Truckers! Canada’s Heroes & Those Who Helped Them.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.