Public Enemy Number One was on the stand Thursday at the Emergencies Act Inquiry. .Yes, that would be Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich, the grandmother whom the authorities treated like she was a dangerous, violent repeat offender. She was locked up, denied bail and rearrested when she attended a dinner honouring free speech. .She was honouring free speech again in Ottawa as she described the reaction of Ottawa residents in a somewhat different way than what you’ve heard from government lawyers, some police officers and especially city Mayor Jim Watson and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ."I encountered hundreds and hundreds of Ottawa residents thanking me, saying that we gave him hope," Lich told the inquiry. .Not surprisingly, Lich testified she did not come to Ottawa this winter to overthrow the government or even to get under the skin of a very testy Trudeau, who — it must be remembered — refused to even talk to the Freedom Convoy demonstrators. He rolled out the red carpet when Black Lives Matter came to town. Trudeau took a knee and endorsed an organization that has done very little to improve the lot of black people, but done much to smear law enforcement through throughout the US. Lich said the convoy was all about bringing a little bit of freedom back to Canada as she was "growing increasingly concerned with the harm I saw the mandates inflicting on Canadians.... I was seeing families torn apart. The suicides in my hometown were so numerous they stopped reporting them," Lich explained as she openly wept. .We heard again at the inquiry the Freedom Convoy was not some monolithic organization where everybody was reading from the same talking points. This was a demonstration assembled quickly and without the large funds available to government and corporations.As a journalist who was on the ground with the Freedom Convoy from day one — and I mean on the cold February ground — I would be the first to attest the group was not always in sync and had difficulty telling reporters where the next news conference was going to be. If you wanted a comment, there wasn’t an easy number or email to access that guaranteed instant satisfaction. You sometimes had to seek these folks out in the lobbies of hotels in the downtown core of Ottawa. . Tamara Lich speaking at the JCCF Freedom awards in CalgaryTamara Lich speaks at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms George Jonas banquet on August 11th 2022, in Calgary. .But there was a sincerity in that disorganization that was like a breath of fresh air. They spoke from the heart and they really believed in this cause. And they weren’t trying to bring down the government in the process. .Lich spoke with the same honesty and passion at the inquiry and it was obvious the ordeal that followed the protest has taken a toll on her. .She still hasn’t even seen the fine print of the mischief charges with which she’s being charged.She told the inquiry: "It's definitely affected my life. I've never been arrested before. The legal process, I find extremely frustrating. I have to live under these legal conditions for a year.".Lich also took time to criticize Trudeau for labeling all the truckers and the entire Freedom Convoy as dangerous political extremists and white supremacists. She said she wasn’t accustomed to being labeled in that manner when she's never been a person with those twisted convictions, yet she and others had to endure a fusillade of smears not just from Trudeau but from other smart-ass politicians who hadn’t the vaguest conception of what this protest was all about. Either that, or they understood it only too well and wanted to distort the purpose for political gain. .Lich probably doesn’t know the impact she and the Freedom Convoy had on Canadian politics and the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC.) It was more than a protest; it was a phenomenon. It broadened the mass appeal of the CPC, energized and catapulted Pierre Poilievre’s leadership campaign to lead that party and was ultimately a foreshadow of Trudeau’s demise, as he was shown to be an elite politicians who had nothing but contempt for ordinary, working Canadians.
