In Trudeau's Canada

It's not really his Canada but he would like to think so:

As scenes emerged of police confronting the Freedom Convoy protesters in Ottawa in February, Kevin Vickers, a former House of Commons sergeant-at-arms and Canada’s ambassador to Ireland from 2015 to 2019, started receiving messages from his international contacts about what was happening in Canada.

“I think those images, whether they’re benign or whatever, are certainly something that will come back to haunt us,” Vickers, who as sergeant-at-arms famously helped subdue Parliament Hill attacker and killer Michael Zehaf-Bibeau in 2014, told The Epoch Times.

“It’s our country’s reputation that’s at stake here. These types of things have to be managed to ensure control, so that Canada’s not seen as being heavy-handed in democracy and towards its citizens.”

 

Too late.

It's not simply that. It is also the fact that no leader should be able to do this. 

Yet here we are.

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Lich was arrested again on Monday in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and is expected to be transported to Ottawa within the next week for violating her bail conditions. On Feb. 17, Lich was arrested and charged with mischief, obstructing police, counselling others to commit mischief and intimidation.

Without downplaying the impact of the freedom convoy on residents of Ottawa’s downtown core, those are hardly charges that would normally see this kind of action by police and prosecutors. Lich has no prior criminal record and has not been convicted of the charges she now faces.

Yet depending on who you listen to, police have either arrested her for being critical of the government – not something that should get anyone arrested – or for being photographed at an event in Toronto with another convoy organizer.

At this point, forgive me for laughing at the idea that either of these are considered bail violations. If we had a justice system in Canada that picked up everyone who broke bail conditions, then I might be prone to saying, that as a law-and-order kind of guy, I could support Lich being detained.

That’s not who we are though, and our system continues to release violent repeat offenders on bail with no regard for community safety. On Monday, I was at a news conference with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Toronto Mayor John Tory where they lamented repeat offenders for gun crimes being out on bail to reoffend.

“Chief Ramer, or before him Chief Saunders, could tell you of many instances, not just one, where people are getting out on bail for example, over and over and over again, when they’re charged with firearms offenses, and that simply has to be changed,” Tory said when discussing the recent spate of shootings in Toronto.

Our paper has been full of such stories and will have more to come in the future I’m sure, but police and prosecutors are worried about Lich taking a photo with someone more than 400 kilometres away from Parliament Hill.

Just this week, Toronto Police were looking for a man in an assault investigation saying the man was wanted on six counts of assault, two counts of assault with a weapon, six counts of choking and six counts of breach of probation among other charges. In another incident, two men were charged in a robbery with robbery with a weapon, disguise with intent, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence and fail to comply recognizance, which is police code for out on bail.

Those are just two cases police revealed on Monday.

One of the worst cases I’ve covered involved two men, both with bail and court conditions upon them, accused of shooting up a child’s birthday party last summer. Three children were injured from bullets flying in that incident.

Yet Tamara Lich is the real threat to society, not hardened, repeat offenders who shoot up streets, commit robberies or repeatedly assault people over several months. Our justice system is not supposed to be political, but whether we’re talking about the Lich case or the recent revelations that Justin Trudeau’s government interfered in the investigation into the Nova Scotia mass shooting, it’s clear we have a government intent on making justice political.