When the story of the Freedom Convoy is told, one name keeps surfacing at the centre of the storm: Tamara Lich. In the winter of 2022, as vaccine mandates and lockdown rules stretched into a third year, she was at the forefront with the truckers who drove on Ottawa and parked there. She became a symbol of resistance not because she sought it, but because the system made her one.
And the system still isn’t letting go.
Fresh from the longest mischief trial in Canadian history, indeed in the entire Commonwealth, Lich’s case was back before an Ottawa court. There is a live application before the court seeking to vary her sentence so she can travel more widely to work for Rebel News. Ezra Levant filed an affidavit describing the work she has done over the past six months. The Crown’s response? Three prosecutors, not one, not two, but three, lined up to cross-examine him on it. That is how far things have come: a journalist made to seek the court’s permission simply to travel for her job, and three government lawyers dispatched to argue about it.
Step outside the Ottawa bubble and the picture changes entirely. Earlier in the month, Ezra and Tamara spent more than twelve hours driving through southern Alberta, from Okotoks to Lethbridge to Medicine Hat. Crowds gathered not because the press told them to, but because they wanted to. People came out in the heat when they could have been doing anything else, just to say hello.
Hellbound and Down 