Lich and Barber were sentenced to house arrest, which will limit their ability to leave home for 12 months, and for the next six months the court ordered them to stay at home after 10 p.m. Both will have to work one hundred hours each for the benefit of their communities. The court took into account the almost 2 months that Lich spent in prison, among others. for violating the bail conditions, so she will have 3.5 months left of the half-year of mandatory stay at home after 10 p.m.
In July this year Lich and Barber were found guilty of some of the charges against them, including causing harm and, in Barber's case, advising others to break court-ordered conditions. The prosecutor's office asked for eight years in prison for Barber and seven years in prison for Lich.
In February this year another of the main organizers of the “convoy”, Pat King, was sentenced to three months of house arrest and 100 hours of community service, at a food bank or a homeless shelter.
Other protestors who had already been sentenced were also sentenced to misdemeanor sentences ranging from three to six months.
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“Freedom Convoy” in Canada. Russian inspiration?
The so-called The “freedom convoy” in January and February 2022 was supposed to be an expression of the protest of truck drivers against health and safety restrictions during the pandemic. During the trucker protests, the federal government used the National Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history, allowing protesters to be removed from the capital and border crossings. This police operation ended on February 17, 2022.
In an analysis published in January 2023 in “The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare”, American disinformation researcher Caroline Orr Bueno wrote, referring to the Russian media's reaction to the Canadian “convoy”, that “it is reasonable to assume that there was Russian involvement in the 2022 truck convoy.”
The money came from people who supported Donald Trump
The public broadcaster CBC, which in 2022 analyzed where foreign donations to the “convoy” came from, revealed that approximately 100 of the largest payments from the US were made by people with the same surnames as the largest donors of the Republican Party or Donald Trump. Among those openly supporting the “convoy” were Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz and well-known Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Court cases related to the “convoy” have not ended yet. At the beginning of February this year. the court agreed to consider a class-action lawsuit for C$300 million brought by Ottawa residents and businesses harmed by protesters, and the appeal of the “convoy” organizers was rejected in March. The court hearing the appeal then found that it was in the public interest for the court to compare the right to protest with the right to use one's home and run a business.
