Political Prisoner, Free Thinker and Free Speech Heroine Ursula Haverbeck Has Passed Away at 96 LONDON. November 20. Moments ago I received a telephone call from our Berlin attorney Wolfram Nahrath who said he wished me to be the first he notified of the sad news that Ursula Haverbeck at age 96 has died, peacefully in her own bed this afternoon. She was surrounded by her closest comrades. Ursula Haverbeck a role-model heroic singular battalion for historical truth and international justice, died as it were in action, while the Hamburg Court are still deciding on her next jail sentence! Her courageously tenacious attorney Wolfram Nahrath had won her freedom at home while the Court continued to deliberate on Ursula’s still running Revisionist battle. Always surrounded by loyal supporters, Ursula was never alone or unattended, and will remain admired and beloved by millions around the free-thinking world.
Sticker seen on a lamppost in East Germany: “For sharing this picture, a pensioner had his house raided. Do you want to live in a police state?”
Culture is mysterious. Terrible, obnoxious and repressive things can happen for a long time without anybody ever seeming to care about them – until, suddenly, for seemingly no reason at all, they spark enormous outrage.
The slogan “Putin is a thief” is one of the most widespread battle cries of the opposition in Russia. An “absolutely offensive” formulation, as Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, once said. But the expression is still one of the more harmless ones. Especially on internet social media networks, wild insults against the president are widespread. In response, parliament passed a law in spring 2019 that makes it easier to punish insults against the president and state symbols.
A year has passed since then – and from the point of view of human rights activists, the law has served primarily to suppress diversity of opinion, politically persecute people, instil fear in them and promote self-censorship. “The law was enacted to protect the honour and dignity of the president,” says Stanislav Selesnev, a lawyer with the human rights organisation Agora … He has found 51 cases in which proceedings have been initiated due to derogatory remarks about Putin.
… Pensioner Anatoly Lileykin called Putin a “criminal” who holds onto power by falsifying elections. For this, a court … imposed a fine of 70,000 rubles (about 850 Euros). … In Germany and other Western democracies, derogatory remarks about politicians are protected by the right to freedom of expression …
According to Agora’s analysis, comments made by citizens on the internet … are being tracked. Denunciation is also widespread. Informers loyal to the Kremlin are scouring the internet to track down critics of Putin. A total of more than 1.6 million roubles in fines have been imposed so far, more than two-thirds of which were for comments about Putin, as Selesnjow has calculated …
“I am convinced that this law exists to create self-censorship and fear among people,” says media expert Galina Arapova. “Everything is being done to make people bite their tongues – and if they do complain, they should do it at home in their kitchens, but never in public,” says the director of the Centre for the Protection of Mass Media in Moscow.
… The nebulous wording of the law sets no limits. Experts such as Arapova believe that the aim from the outset was to curb growing criticism … Because of the deterrent penalties, this has also been successful. The human rights activist Selesnev suspects that in view of the widespread dissatisfaction caused by the economic crisis, criticism of the Kremlin will also increase. In that case, the sentences would be even harsher in the future.
That world exists no more, but its vanishing has long escaped popular notice. We here on the dark and nefarious internet might write about the authoritarian turn in German politics, but as everyone knows we’re mere Russian trolls and what we say doesn’t matter. Something about the police raiding the home of 64 year-old Franconian pensioner Stefan Niehoff for retweeting a meme calling Habeck a moron, however, has caused the scales to fall from millions of eyes. The case has provoked an enormous scandal all across the internet and the press, to the point that anybody who googles “Schwachkopf” will find nothing but article after article about Robert Habeck.
In his zeal to stop people from calling him a moron, Habeck has associated himself with the slur for all time; he might as well have his picture printed in dictionaries next to the word, that is what a massive own-goal our ministerial moron has achieved here.
The police raided Niehoff’s home as part of their “Eleventh Action Day against Antisemitic Hate Crimes on the Internet.” Our Interior Minister Nancy Faeser gleefully reported afterwards that this dubious holiday of judicial repression had consisted of 127 different operations, among them that against Niehoff. At this point you might be asking how calling Habeck a moron could possibly be antisemitic, and this question turns out to have a very revealing answer. The Bamberg Prosecutors’ Office later announced that, while they had raided Niehoff’s house in response to Habeck’s personally-filed criminal complaint, they were also investigating the man for the crime of incitement:
There is an initial suspicion of incitement … since the 64-year-old is also accused of having uploaded an image to the internet platform X in spring 2024, on which an SS or SA man can be seen holding a placard with the inscription “Germans don’t buy from Jews” … adding the additional text “True Democrats! We’ve seen it all before!”
We need some tedious context to understand this. It’s worth it, I promise.
Last spring, when we were having our great societal paroxysm “against the right,” there was much hue and cry about the dairy brand Müller, because its owner, Theo Müller, turned out to be friends with Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Alice Weidel. The usual suspects announced boycott campaigns against Müller, and activists started pasting stickers in supermarkets telling shoppers not to buy Müller products. Niehoff committed his grave antisemitic crime in response to a tweet about this boycott campaign.
At the top, the “Hamburg Alliance Against the Right” post a picture of their anti-Müller boycott stickers in a supermarket. Below, Niehoff answers by saying “You’re true democrats! We had all this before!” He includes a picture of an SA man holding a sign reading “Germans, do not buy from Jews.”
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts campaigns against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column. In all of this, our speech police demonstrated a typical social media illiteracy – an inability to understand what retweets are (in the case of the original “Schwachkopf” repost), and an inability to understand irony (in the case of the “Deutsche-kauft-nicht-bei-Juden” post). Perhaps censors have always been towering idiots who fail even to understand the media that they are sent to control.
Habeck submitted the complaint against Niehoff personally, and this has lent the Schwachkopf controversy particular significance. Generally Habeck works with an agency called “So Done,” which files criminal complaints to protect their social media-obsessed clients from mean internet people. So Done, however, are in full retreat from this scandal, eagerly telling all and sundry that they had nothing to do with the Schwachkopf case and that they would never, ever, in a million years, have brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities. No, Niehoff did not have his home raided via some bureaucratic accident; Habeck filed the complaint himself. Being called a moron before all 901 of this man’s followers so enraged our Minister of Economic Affairs that he went straight to the police.
That is who Habeck is, and it is a reality that the man has gone to great lengths to suppress. Online he poses as just some guy having a conversation in a pullover …
He announced his hopeless candidacy for the chancellorship sitting at some kitchen table, assuring Germans that he’s just one of us.
Habeck, however, is plainly not one of us. All of this is a standard-issue Green political fantasy – one developed by marketing agencies and focus groups, and it is very nearly the opposite of the truth. The Greens are a political elite who employ anti-elitist aesthetics and rhetoric to discredit the traditional conservative politics of the Federal Republic. The fiction is a delicate one, because people like Habeck are overtly disliked by ordinary people above all. This discontent has to be bottled up, explained away and shut down, all to maintain the myth that Habeck is just an average dude. In Habeck Land, his critics are an illusion of the algorithms, a product of Russian troll farms and also antisemitic criminals who are full of hate and deserve criminal prosecution. In this way elites who spend their days pretending that they are not elites prove to be very dangerous.
At the beginning of the legislative period, when things were so tough, I decided to report insults and threats. There are a lot of them. This is filtered through agencies and in this case it came from the Bavarian police. Of course, “moron” is not the worst insult that has ever been uttered. But what happened then, namely that the public prosecutor’s office then confiscated the laptop or the end device – in other words went into the house – my report only triggered that, I believe. Because in the police statement, there was talk of racist or antisemitic motives. That’s why I think that … my report was only the trigger.
We’ve seen that Habeck’s personal social media snitches at So Done did not report the Schwachkopf retweet, so it’s hard to know what his appeal to mysterious filtering agencies can mean. Otherwise, Niehoff’s allegedly antisemitic post had nothing to do with the police search. Habeck would rather lie than apologise, which is very consistent with the kind of person who is deeply invested in ratting out every last one of his detractors to authorities.
Then, I would look more closely at the file and consider whether to make a complaint, but I already have a policy of reporting insults, threats and hate. There are hundreds of messages like that. Afterwards, by the way, the courts decide how to deal with them. So… what happened there is a court decision, I have no influence over that.
And in response to a follow-up question about whether he thought the police raid was disproportionate, Habeck said this:
Well, if it was just that statement, that probably would have been disproportionate, but if I remember the Bavarian police’s press release correctly, it’s about something completely different. This statement was only one of the things they mentioned. I think there were other facts to be clarified.
It is the same misdirections all over again, although you’ll note that Habeck – between his first and his second statements – has gotten a lot more careful about throwing around words like “racist” and “antisemitic.” There are presumably lawyers on the other side of this now, and cabinet ministers are not (yet) above the law.
More disturbing were oblique remarks Habeck made a few days ago at the recent Green Party conference. The guiding theme of his candidacy for the chancellorship is the importance of liberal democracy and the coming clash between our European democratic order and rising (Russian or, I guess, American) authoritarianism. These are awkward topics for a man who enjoys punishing his critics, and so when Habeck came to praise “this idea of popular self-determination” or “freedom,” he felt the need to address the contradiction:
[I mean] freedom in the sense of the rule of law, not in the vulgar sense – if I may say that much, in view of the reporting of the last 24 hours. It is a mistake to believe that liberalism means thinking only of oneself. That is not freedom. Nor is it political freedom. Freedom is interwoven with conditions, with institutions.
I am not entirely sure what this means, and I’m not sure that Habeck does, either. What he is trying to say, though, is something like this: “Freedom” does not mean that Germans get to do whatever they want, politically or otherwise. They cannot just call Habeck a moron. “Freedom” is rather a conditional thing – some mysterious property that is mediated by “institutions,” like those institutions Habeck happens to control. Other understandings of “freedom,” particularly unconditional and institutionally unmediated understandings, are “vulgar” and mistaken.
The Contrast Between A Free State (Florida) & A Cringing, Cramped Control-Freak Dominated Country (Canada)
‘While our COVID mandates made it a serious offence to be in any Canadian workplace unmasked, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida made it an offence for any Florida employer to require employees to even wear a mask.” — Howard Levitt (National Post, November 16, 2024)
Incidentally, despite the lockdowns, forced masking, forced vaxxing, Ontario had a slightly HIGHER deathrate from COVID than free Florida.
Ex-Ontario MPP Randy Hillier has Freedom Convoy-related charges stayed over delays
The March 2022 charges included assaulting a peace officer, mischief, counselling others to commit mischief and resisting or obstructing a peace officer
Author of the article:
The Canadian Press
Published Nov 15, 2024 • 1 minute read
69 Comments
Ontario MPP Randy Hillier arrives at Ottawa police head quarters to face with criminal charges relating to the freedom convoy rally, March 28, 2022. Photo by Tony Caldwell/Postmedia/File
OTTAWA — The criminal charges against former Ontario legislator Randy Hillier related to his participation in the Freedom Convoy protest have been stayed after a judge ruled his case had taken too long.
Hillier was charged in March 2022 with nine offences connected to his role in the demonstrations early that year, in which protesters gridlocked downtown Ottawa in protest of COVID-19 pandemic measures and the federal government.
The charges include assaulting a peace officer, mischief, counselling others to commit mischief and resisting or obstructing a peace officer.
Hillier, who represented an Ottawa-area riding in the provincial legislature from 2007 to 2022, chose to be tried before a judge and jury in Ontario Superior Court, and a four-week trial was set to begin in January.
The Supreme Court of Canada has set mandatory time limits for court cases, with a 30-month cap for those being heard in Superior Court.
In a ruling released Thursday, Superior Court Justice Kerry McVey found the case had gone over the maximum threshold, spanning 31 months and 13 days after deducting delays caused by the defence and exceptional circumstances.
MILTON, November 13, 2024. Today supporters of the Canadian Association for Free Expression staged an hour long rally outside the Maplehurst Detention Centre, where political prisoner, Les Bory has been held without bail since February 14, 2024. This is one of a series of rallies CAFE has held since the Spring to call attention to this travesty of justice.
We were coming up on Remembrance Day. On November 11, we remember the sacrifices are soldiers made supposedly to protect freedom. Yet, one of those most basic freedoms — freedom of speech — is severely under attack in Canada today. Equally, part of the repressive state is the denial of bail to non-violent dissidents. Remembrance day was not be a solemn day for Political Prisoner Les Bory. It will be a bitter reminder of how Canada has strayed from its ideals of freedom. He spent this day confined to the Maplehurst Detention Centre, denied bail, held as a political prisoner for the non-violent expression of his political beliefs.
We’ve all met and heard political prisoner Leslie Bory. As of Remembrance Day, he will have spent 634 days in remand. He has been charged with three counts of uttering threats against privileged groups via a podcast, February 11, 2023. Several attempts to get bail for Leslie for a non-violent alleged crime have been denied. Leslie has no criminal record. The papers are filled with stories of violent criminals let back on the streets despite previous convictions for violence. His lawyer indicates that an “expedited” (that used to mean speeded up) trial for Leslie may not occur until January 2025! He will have spent two years and suffered two years’ loss of freedom and income without a conviction.
However, this is political! One of the groups he allegedly threatened or made nasty comments about is Canada’s most privileged group and I don’t mean Icelanders._____________________________
Time to Subscribe/Renew: Time To Commit to Supporting Free Speech
CAFE, Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3
__ Please enrol/renew me as a subscriber to the Free Speech Monitor ($30)
__ Here’s my Christmas gift of $______to CAFÉ to support free speech, to support the political prisoners and CAFE’s campaign to stop Bill C-63. [Due to the vile behaviour of BMO, please make cheques payable to Paul Fromm.]
Please charge ______ to my VISA#________________________________________________________
Bill Whatcott at a gun range shooting a Berretta 9 mm handgun. Only 2 years ago this was a common firearm, legally owned by thousands of Canadian handgun enthusiasts who went through the proper legal channels to possess these wonderful guns. Prime Minister Trudeau banned these firearms through a parliamentary order two years ago and interestingly he has done nothing to address the actual rising violent crime and disorder which has become a plague across the country.
In fact in 2021 Trudeau’s Liberals got rid of mandatory minimum sentences for actual gun criminals. As a result of Trudeau abolishing mandatory minimums for gun crimes, one of the Trudeau’s appointed judges, Justice Jill Copeland (she ordered me to go on trial a second time for a Gospel flyer), was able to give a black offender a conditional sentence (no time in jail). Justice Copeland in her decision said the major reason for giving the guy a non-custodial sentence was his skin colour. The criminal Copeland sent home was Shacquane Stewart. He threw a loaded .40 cal handgun into a school yard when police were pursuing him as a result of a cocaine deal gone bad. Fortunately, a school custodian found the loaded gun, the following day, rather than one of the children. Six weeks after receiving his conditional sentence Shacquane was arrested at his probation officer’s office in a stolen car, with another loaded handgun, and a search of his apartment netted 107 grams of cocaine. Justice Copeland in justifying her racist and absurd sentence also reasoned that Shacquane was “at low risk to reoffend.” These are the types of judges Trudeau has been stacking our courts with.
The firearms behind me are on display at the gun club I attended. All of them with the exception of the semi auto shotgun at the top of the display are now prohibited in Canada. Those of us who value firearm freedom must lobby Pollievre to reverse the handgun ban. I must admit I don’t have much faith in Pollievre to follow through on his commitments to restore gun rights, defund the CBC, or end transgender mutilation of children. Pollievre’s slogan “Axe the tax” has been repeated enough, he will likely end the carbon tax, but the necessary fundamental shift of taking us out of harmful treaties like the Paris Accord and challenging the false, media backed, premise of the carbon tax (that Canada must end the tiny amount of CO2 emissions we create to avert armaggedon) will not likely be challenged by him.
On election night I hung out with the Constitution Party (sort of like Canada’s Christian Heritage Party) in Milwaukee Wisconsin. I was blessed to see their leader Randall Terry came to Milwaukee with his Vice President Pastor Stephen Broden for election night. Randall Terry like me has been jailed and sued multiple times for trying to save babies at abortion mills. Randall Terry’s book “Why does a nice guy like me keep getting thrown in jail,” was a major inspiration in my early activist years. Pastor Stephen Broden was a blessing to listen to as well. He is the one black leader who has the courage and wisdom to articulate what is wrong with critical race theory, the toxic Marxist inpired theory that underpins Justice Copeland’s flawed assumption that all blacks in Toronto suffer from systemic racism. Copeland’s racist and Marxist thinking led her to a place where she thought she should let a black gun criminal avoid jail time after he tossed a loaded, illegally obtained, handgun into a school yard when police start pursuing him after his drug deal went bad.
Randall Terry had me briefly share about the so-called hate crime, double jeopardy, trial I am facing when I get back to Canada.
My good friends JR Harrison, host of the BJ Edwards Natural Family podcast on the left, and my good friend Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth, who I got arrested with at the University of Regina back in 2014 on the right.
Here is the video of me and Peter being arrested. We were charged with Mischief, but eventually acquitted.
A good friend Keith who has faithfully supported me with my legal battles over the years on the left, and Brian Camenkar, Executive Director of Mass Resistance (they have been very loyal friends), enjoy lunch and fellowship at a restraunt in the suburbs of Boston.
I went to Grace Chapel in Foxborough Massachusetts on Sunday. The church was kind of milquetoast for my liking. This guy on the stage is a youth pastor I think. The senior pastor was not in person but delivered his sermon on a video screen. The sermon was sort of like Kamala Harris’ campaign theme. The sermon’s theme was on “Joy,” but the sermon was a little better than Kamala’s campaign as it had a few Bible verses added to it. Part of the sermon was also dedicated to America’s post election results. The Pastor said some in the congregation would be happy with Trump, but he urged them to be sensitive to congregants who could be emotionally devastated and fearful after Kamala Harris lost. I must admit, I had some concerns with the Pastor’s seeming lack of understanding that Harris’ agenda was the antithesis of what Christians should want for America.
Anyways, I will be back in Canada Monday. I will be stopping in St Catharines to visit a dear Pastor who seems to be recovering from cancer thanks to Ivermectin. I was a fan of Ivermectin for Covid, but I was highly skeptical that the anti-fever, anti-parasite drug has any efficacy for colon cancer. That being said the Pastor’s tumor has shrunk 80% after 6 weeks of taking Ivermectin.
I will be back in Alberta next week where I hope to shoot a deer before deer season ends and then linger between Alberta and Ontario and try to survive until I have to be back in court in Toronto in June 23-27, 2025 (Homosexual UnGodly Pride parade week I think). Then I am in court in Toronto again, October 27-31, 2025. And then my trial is finally slated to start March 2, 2026 and is expected to last two weeks.
For those who wish to help with some of my expenses related to this homofascist inspired double jeopardy prosecution you can donate here: https://www.lifefunder.com/whatcott
In Christ’s Service, Bill Whatcott
“For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.” Romans 1:26,27
President Donald J. Trump announced a new policy initiative aimed to dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech. TRANSCRIPT: President Donald J. Trump — Free Speech Policy Initiative
If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one. They’ll go down.
That’s why today, I am announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime, and to reclaim the right to Free Speech for all Americans. And reclaim is a very important word in this case because they’ve taken it away.
In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American People. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health.
The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed — and it must happen immediately. And here is my plan:
FIRST, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information”. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly—whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.
SECOND, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters — and we have to do this right now — to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.
THIRD, upon my inauguration as president, I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business. From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to INCREASE their efforts to take down UNLAWFUL content, such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.
FOURTH, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called “mis-” and “dis-information.” The federal government should immediately stop funding all non-profits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any U.S. university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past—such as flagging social media content for removal [and] blacklisting—those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years, and maybe more. We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote. And once you lose those elections and once you lose your borders like we have, you no longer have a country. Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former Deep Staters and intelligence officials, there should be a 7-year cooling-off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of U.S. user data.
FIFTH, the time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital Bill of Rights. This should include a right to digital due process—in other words, government officials should need a COURT ORDER to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.
Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow-banned, or otherwise restricted no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose.
The fight for Free Speech is a matter of victory or death for America—and for the survival of Western Civilization itself. When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left.
By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation. Thank you, and God Bless America.
Clayton McAllister, a truck driver from London, Ontario, attended The Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa, joining many others in a movement that began in early 2022. The convoy was organized by truck drivers protesting the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers and other pandemic restrictions.
As participants drove to Ottawa in late January to demand an end to the mandates and a restoration of personal freedoms, the protest quickly gained momentum. Big rig trucks blocked downtown Ottawa streets, creating significant disruptions and attracting widespread attention. The demonstration lasted for weeks before the government invoked the Emergencies Act in mid-February, granting law enforcement sweeping powers to clear protestors and remove the blockades.
McAllister did not attend the protest as a truck driver, but went to show support for the truckers’ cause. Driving his pickup truck and trailer loaded with donated food and supplies, he planned to stay for only two days. However, after witnessing the mainstream media’s portrayal of protestors as “terrorists,” McAllister felt compelled to remain longer. He argued that this characterization was “not the case at all.”
Arrested shortly after the Emergencies Act was invoked, McAllister faced charges of mischief, resisting arrest, and disturbing the peace. Recalling the day of his arrest, he described how, after police began moving in, he lay down in front of them in the snow before being taken into custody. He was placed in a paddy wagon and left there for eight hours, denied access to a lawyer. Eventually, he was driven out of town and dropped off at a gas station with his phone battery almost dead.
Adding to the ordeal, police seized the keys to McAllister’s truck, which was parked in downtown Ottawa, leaving him unable to retrieve it. Two days later, he watched on TV as officers smashed the windows of his truck before it was towed away. Later, McAllister discovered that all of his bank accounts had been frozen.
Nearly two and a half years later, McAllister received a major victory when the Crown notified his lawyer that all charges against him would be withdrawn. Initially, the Crown offered McAllister a peace bond, with a restriction preventing him from attending any protest, gathering, or rally with more than 25 people for one year.
McAllister rejected the offer, standing firm on his belief that “I’m not giving in to being silenced—that’s the main principle I’m fighting for.” The Crown returned with a revised offer—a peace bond without protest restrictions, provided McAllister wrote a 100-word paragraph explaining the difference between a political protest and criminal mischief. McAllister accepted this offer.
In February of this year, federal court judge Justice Richard G. Mosley ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unconstitutional. This landmark decision triggered a wave of lawsuits against the federal government, with McAllister joining 19 other plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages each. The federal government has filed an appeal challenging Justice Mosley’s decision.
McAllister’s lawyer, Ian McCuaig, spoke with The Canadian Independent, expressing satisfaction with the verdict and noting that “Mr. McAllister is happy, and that is a measure of success.” McCuaig emphasized McAllister’s strong defense, which centered on multiple Charter violations.
He argued that McAllister’s rights had been repeatedly breached, including violations of his section 10 rights, as he was denied access to a lawyer and had his property unlawfully seized. Additionally, McCuaig cited unlawful detention and a breach of section 7, pointing out that McAllister had been “driven against his will to a remote location and abandoned.” These violations, McCuaig contended, made “a compelling argument for a stay of proceedings.”
McCuaig also highlighted the importance of the outcome in preserving McAllister’s section 2 rights, which guarantee freedom of movement and association. “His right to engage in protected expression was not compromised,” McCuaig said, adding, “That was a priority for me, as someone who values those rights dearly.”
