OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – The trial for Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber is set to resume January 4 in an Ottawa courthouse.
The trial has been on hiatus since December 7, 2023.
Some significant developments have taken place since the trial paused for Christmas break.
Notably, Lich returned to social media after 22 months, having been banned from using all platforms by the court as part of her earlier bail conditions that were suddenly eased before Christmas.
She reactivated her X (formerly Twitter) account shortly thereafter, writing, “It has been 22 long months since I have been allowed to log in to my Twitter account,” Lich wrote Thursday. “@elonmusk did anything interesting happen while I’ve been away???!!?!”
Lich has made a few posts since returning to social media, although it remains to be seen how vocal she will be once the trial resumes.
Also before Christmas, the Freedom Convoy leaders’ lawyers said a $290 million class-action lawsuit filed by disgruntled Ottawa residents against the leaders is designed to “silence” the leaders’ right to free “expression.” The Freedom Convoy leaders’ lawyers have applied to have the case dismissed.
On the last day of the trial for 2023, the Democracy Fund (TDF), which is crowdfunding Lich’s legal costs, noted that the court will resume in 2024 with a “voir dire,” or trial within a trial, to be “held over how comments made by the judge presiding over the Ottawa injunction order of February 2022 should be treated.”
“In the days following, there should be a decision on the defense motion to dismiss the Carter application,” TDF said.
The trial, which began September 5, 2023, was supposed to have lasted only a few weeks.
In 2022, lawyers for both sides agreed that 16 days would be a reasonable amount of time for a fair trial. The Crown, however, took a long time going through its witness list, which slowed the pace of the trial to a crawl.
Thus far, per TDF, the Crown has asserted “that the absence of violence or peaceful nature of the protest didn’t make it lawful, emphasizing that the onus was on the Crown to prove the protest’s unlawfulness.”
The Crown has been holding steadfast to the notion in trying to prove that Lich and Barber had somehow influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy. This claim has been rejected by the defense as weak.
The reality is that Lich and Barber worked with police on many occasions so that the protests were within the law.
Lich and Barber are facing multiple charges from the 2022 protests, including mischief, counseling mischief, counseling intimidation and obstructing police for taking part in and organizing the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy. As reported by LifeSiteNews at the time, despite the non-violent nature of the protest and the charges, Lich was jailed for weeks before she was granted bail.
In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14.
During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.
LifeSiteNews has been covering the trial extensively.