In early April 2026, Tamara Lich, who helped organize the 2022 truckers’ Freedom Convoy to Ottawa, gave a talk at the University of Calgary. One of the largest lecture theatres, holding over 400 people, was nearly filled. She spoke for an hour and a half without notes and then took another half hour of questions. In return for some minimal assistance in booking the room, I was rewarded with a collection of chocolates (since consumed) and a copy of her book, Hold the Line: My Story from the Heart of the Freedom Convoy. Her talk and her book embodied in my mind the last gasp of Canadian self-respect and pride. More surprisingly, it also expressed the much rarer view that the struggle against bureaucratic tyranny directed by the Government of Canada was more spiritual than political.Tamara’s secular story was amazing enough. She worked in the oil patch in Medicine Hat, managing logistics at Schlumberger, and then at STEP Energy Services, a skill that later proved useful in helping the operations of the Freedom Convoy run smoothly. Early on, she was convinced that Justin Trudeau was as determined as his father, Pierre, to ensure “Alberta simply wasn’t going to thrive.” He “just wanted to stick it to Alberta,” and attacking its major industry, oil and gas, was an obvious way of doing so. This was one reason, she said, that Trudeau relied on Gerald Butts, author of Ontario’s disastrous “green energy” policies enacted by Premier Dalton McGuinty. The existing moral panic around anthropogenic climate change that even Trudeau knew was bogus gave him a plausible cover.Tamara’s first political action was to push back against Ottawa, initially with the “Yellow Vests” movement, then with the “United We Roll” convoy in February 2019. By early 2022, she was active in the Wexit movement, later the Wildrose Independence Party (WIPA). Meanwhile, the COVID-19 event expanding from China was followed in Canada by federally and provincially ordered lockdowns, masking, and so forth. Marco Navarro-Génie and I discussed the whole sorry business in Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023). Tamara followed the rules: “I wasn’t about to ruin the day of some grocery clerk or nurse” by refusing to don a mask even though she knew it was as useful in blocking the virus as a chain-link fence is in keeping mosquitoes out of the backyard. She even wore a mask after her arrest when she was strip-searched by the Ottawa cops.Eighteen months after the bureaucratic controls began, came the decree making mRNA vaxxes compulsory. These novel injections were called vaccines, as if you were going to be jabbed with something akin to a measles or even a polio vaccine. They were not and are not at all like the earlier shots. They were touted as being 100% safe when no one could possibly know the medium- or long-term effects. In fact, later studies showed that myocarditis and thrombosis, among other malign effects, were associated with getting jabbed. We were told that all you needed was one — just like measles — but then you needed two, or three, or four….What was going on here? And why were healthcare professionals, docs, and nurses objecting? For health bureaucrats and administrators and for the politicians who listened to them, it was absurd that front-line nurses and docs knew something about the vaxx risks they could observe daily in the responses of their patients. For their administrative superiors (but medical inferiors), the docs and nurses were just disobedient. Tamara was more accurate: by causing “so much suffering that didn’t need to happen,” the bureaucrats had “dehumanized us all.”The effect of their supporters, however, was the opposite. For example, Tamara spoke with Neoline Villebrun, a clan mother and former chief from the Copper Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, who volunteered to organize drummers along the route to Ottawa, “and she was also going to pray for us.” The entire event was becoming more significant than any of the organizers initially realized, and certainly more than a conventional protest against a stupid and repressive government policy. “We were reuniting a people that had been torn apart. Here I was connecting with a Dene clan mother all the way out in the territories. Our message was reaching her, and she was reaching out to us. It made me understand what this was really about. This was about humanity, the opposite of dehumanization.”Next, the government authorities and the politicians widened the net of those who had to be vaxxed to include cops, first responders, garbage collectors, priests, and (gasp!) university professors. As Tamara said, “every single guardrail that Canadians had counted on to hold government power in check had failed completely.” It started with the Charter and ended when common sense was replaced by bureaucratic fantasies that required complete submission and obedience. In Calgary, the grandiose intentions of the bureaucrats were exemplified by the arrest of a kid for shooting hoops in a park. By himself. Early in 2022, the federal health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, mused about making vaxxes compulsory for everyone. Later, he said that no one will ever be “fully vaccinated” against COVID, which meant compulsory vaxxes for everyone, forever.In March 2020, a week after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 event a global pandemic, Justin Trudeau declared the truckers to be national heroes. They were “working overtime to keep us safe and the country moving.” He publicly thanked them “for being there for us” and assured them “that all Canadians are grateful for your service.” He continued this praise for weeks and on Easter compared the truckers to the soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge, defending “the values we hold dear.” Five months later, on Labour Day, the same story..A little over a year later, however, the truckers were included among those needing to be vaxxed by January 15, 2022, like it or not — at least if they wanted to cross the border with the US. Among those who objected was Chris Barber, later Tamara’s co-defendant in litigation brought by the Government of Canada (which is still going on). The sociology of truckers, especially long-haul truckers delivering cukes from the Central Valley of California or avocados from Mexico, tends to attract proud, independent, and self-sufficient characters. Long days alone in the cab tend to provide ample time to think and to reinforce these personality traits. For many of them, it was simply insulting to be considered by politicians to be heroes one day and then to be compelled to submit to a jab about which many of them (and many other Canadians) had serious reservations.The next development was the coalescing of several contingent networks of individuals who may have known one another or who may have heard of one another. Enabled by social media, they developed a proposal and then a plan to drive to Ottawa to protest the latest government overreach and to explain directly to government officials and politicians why those people were doing bad things. Tamara was initially uncertain about the entire enterprise but got involved anyway and came up with the name “Freedom Convoy.” As the convoy attracted more participants — at one point it was over a hundred kilometres long — and drew more attention to its message that the governments within Canada had massively exceeded their authority or, more directly, that government repression was based on force and fraud, as Machiavelli would say, Tamara became increasingly concerned about what the Government of Canada in particular would do next. And, in fact, as early as March 2020, while still praising the truckers, Justin Trudeau had contemplated eventually using the Emergencies Act to retain, he thought, control of the situation.The story of the truckers’ presence in downtown Ottawa has already been beautifully and fairly told by Andrew Lawton (now an MP) and Donna Laframboise. Tamara’s more personal perspective added its own strength to the more general narrative of popular resistance to tyranny. Consider in this context how she was attacked by the mainstream media, starting with the truly repugnant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Early in her book, Tamara made an obvious remark: if you are an indigenous leader fighting oil and gas development or maybe just dissing Alberta or criticizing settler colonialism, you will have reporters lionizing your struggle on the nightly news. “But you’ll be treated a lot differently if you’re a Métis grandma with the wrong politics.” That was Tamara’s position, so her otherwise sparkling collective identity was ignored. Accordingly, the Ottawa Citizen noted that Lich “claims Native heritage.” In fact, she is a card-carrying member of the Alberta Métis Nation. CBC reached a new low by saying that Russians were behind the convoy, much as Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security advisor and the Canadian Deep State incarnate, said that the kids in the bouncy castles along Wellington Street were being abused.The truckers had to deal with genuine political opponents as well. Under pressure from the Government of Canada, for example, GoFundMe folded — unlike what happened when their services were used by Black Lives Matter, which engaged in real violence. It took Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to threaten GoFundMe with a lawsuit in his state to stop them and hostile lawyers from trying to steal the truckers’ money. The convoy then moved their fundraising arm to a Christian organization. Likewise, Antifa was circulating around the Freedom Convoy, causing trouble that the mainstream media relished reporting. The Ottawa municipal cops “had no idea what they were doing,” for which the more professional Ontario Provincial Police apologized..By the end of their stay, “we were tired. People wanted to go home. All we wanted was someone in power to meet with us and talk to us and hear us out.” It never happened. By mid-February, the truckers had decided to clear out, which was a gradual process, and head home. The timing was significant: “before Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, we had already struck a deal with the City of Ottawa to start clearing the trucks out.” The local cops, the city politicians, and the federal government all knew it. That was a signal to Trudeau to bring the hammer down. “Right after we had a deal to move the trucks. He didn’t want this to end peacefully. He wanted a fight.” In short, “Trudeau had blown everything up” in a spasm of aggression and vanity.The story of her and Chris Barber’s trial and incarceration — exposure to “the faceless banality of state cruelty,” she called it — was appalling. Moiz Karimjee, a Liberal Party supporter, was the prosecutor. “Instead of Karimjee having to prove his case against me, my lawyers were forced to prove that I was innocent of the absurd claims that Karimjee kept making that had no basis in reality.” The judge who let Karimjee get away with all this abuse at her bail hearing, Julie Bourgeois, was another Liberal Party supporter, having carried the party’s banner in the 2011 election. At sentencing, Karimjee’s office went further still, demanding seven years for Tamara Lich and eight for Chris Barber on a mischief charge — near enough to the “dime” that Solzhenitsyn’s zeks drew in the GULAG. Even the trial judge, Heather Perkins-McVey, would have none of it, remarking that people convicted of robbery or aggravated assault rarely receive sentences in the range the Crown proposed.She was able to resist this persistent tyranny in part because of all the tears she had shed. Tamara was especially touched by kids and old people whose support turned her “into a puddle of tears. But they also gave me much of the strength I would soon need for all that was about to come.” Later, she recollected: “I had so many people come up to me and just start crying…. I have the tears of thousands of Canadians on my shoulder, who every day told me that we were bringing them hope.” No wonder the sadistic moralists in the Government of Canada appealed her and Chris Barber’s initial acquittal.Such support initially brought her courage. “I was done with their intimidation tactics. They lost their power over me. I firmly believe that the entire thing was guided by God.” During the initial organization and on the trip to Ottawa, “many, many things seemed to happen because of providence, each one making us more and more certain that we were travelling a righteous path.” Providential support carried over to her time in jail at the hands of the Trudeau government and their supporters in the legal system. “Every day I was in there I told myself: ‘Thy will, not my will.’ If this is what God needed from me, then I could do it.” .Her reflections on the help she received reminded me of the moving verse from a cowboy poem by Doris Daley: “We knew drought and fire and heartache, we knew fat, and we knew bone. But we were silver lining people, and we never rode alone.”The genuineness of the spiritual stamina shown by Tamara Lich is most authentically presented in her concluding words regarding Justin Trudeau. “I want you to know that Justin Trudeau has three beautiful children, so remember that we don’t have to like what he does, but I’m going to ask you to pray for him, too. And I’m going to ask you when you fly a Fuck Trudeau sign, remember that he has three kids — just like me…. I’ve always said as human beings we make choices from one of two places: we make choices from love, or we make choices from fear.”Unlike a couple of names that come to mind, Tamara Lich (and Chris Barber) would honour the Order of Canada if that organization had the imagination, prudence, and intelligence to offer them membership.Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Author of 35 books and 200 studies, his book on terrorism was recovered by Seal Team Six during their visit to the Osama bin Laden compound in Abbottabad in May 2011.
