Police officer challenges harsh discipline in free speech case
The Ontario Civilian Police Commission recently heard the appeal of Constable Michael Brisco on November 21, 2023, who is challenging his conviction and penalty for donating to the Ottawa Freedom Convoy in early 2022. This case raises questions about the Charter’s protection for freedom of expression, the right of police officers to support political causes while off duty, and the privacy rights of all Canadians. Constable Michael Brisco of the Windsor Police Service is a highly trained and respected police officer with no prior disciplinary record. He made a $50 donation to the peaceful Freedom Convoy protest through the GiveSendGo fundraising platform on February 8, 2022 – one day after an Ontario Superior Court Judge held that people could continue to engage in “peaceful, lawful and safe protest” in Ottawa so long as honking ceased. When making his donation, Constable Brisco did not identify himself as a police officer and did not contribute to the protest in his capacity as a police officer. After a six-day hearing in February 2023 before an Ontario Provincial Police Adjudicator, Constable Brisco was found guilty of discreditable conduct. Two months later, on May 18, 2023, the Tribunal ordered that Constable Brisco should forfeit pay for 80 hours of work as a penalty. With the support of the Justice Centre, on June 14, 2023, Constable Brisco filed a Notice of Appeal with Ontario Civilian Police Commission, challenging his conviction and the imposed penalty.
Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground
Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most. His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.
This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff. It is how he actually thinks. It is not like we had no warning.
The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment. This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted. It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead. It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.
In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest. The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite. His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates. The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated. Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on. Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA. There was no reasonable justification for this. It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick. The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.
Remember that. The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest. That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist. Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years. Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet. The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw. Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom. Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced. In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.
The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest. The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer. The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd. This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.
Note that I said “until this week”. There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them. This time it was violence by the state. On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will. Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them. Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police. Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas. No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.
The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked, The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC. Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses. The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet. It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments. The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.
His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well. The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.
Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.
None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone. Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership. Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”. Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars. When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy. He did so with a straight face. The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free. The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea. A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out. Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few private media companies who continue to do this. He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him. Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views. Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.
When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other. It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship. This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like. Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.
By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before. Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will. Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all. —
Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most. His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.
This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff. It is how he actually thinks. It is not like we had no warning.
The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment. This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted. It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead. It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.
In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest. The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite. His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates. The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated. Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on. Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA. There was no reasonable justification for this. It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick. The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.
Remember that. The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest. That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist. Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years. Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet. The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw. Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom. Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced. In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.
The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest. The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer. The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd. This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.
Note that I said “until this week”. There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them. This time it was violence by the state. On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will. Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them. Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police. Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas. No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.
The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked, The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC. Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses. The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet. It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments. The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.
His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well. The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.
Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.
None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone. Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership. Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”. Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars. When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy. He did so with a straight face. The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free. The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea. A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out. Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few private media companies who continue to do this. He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him. Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views. Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.
When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other. It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship. This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like. Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.
The Ontario government has secured a court order to freeze access to millions of dollars donated to the Freedom Convoy through crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo.
Premier Doug Ford’s office said in a statement Thursday evening that the attorney general brought an application to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice under Section 490.8 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
This application, said the premier’s office, sought to prohibit people from “disposing of, or otherwise dealing with” donations made through the Freedom Convoy and Adopt-A-Trucker pages on GiveSendGo.
“This afternoon, the order was issued,” said the premier’s office in a statement on Thursday. “It binds any and all parties with possession or control over these donations.”
The Freedom Convoy’s organizers and lawyer were not immediately available for comment although spokesperson Benjamin Dichter did joke about the GiveSendGo being frozen in a tweet.
