While Americans rightfully resent the lockdowns, mask mandates, and other intrusions into their liberty that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic (not to mention politicians’ flouting of their own rules), most of us had it pretty easy compared to people elsewhere. In Canada, for example, pandemic restrictions were tighter and lasted longer than in the United States. That prompted public pushback culminating in the protest known as the Freedom Convoy and draconian retaliation against demonstrators by the Canadian government. While the government’s actions have since been ruled unconstitutional, two of the Freedom Convoy’s leaders have been convicted for their efforts and potentially face prison sentences longer than those handed out to killers and rapists.

Extraordinary Sentences for ‘Unprecedented Crime’ of Protest

“The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime, as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber,” the CBC’s Arthur White-Crummey reported last week. “Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber.”

In April, Barber and Lich were acquitted of the most serious charges against them, including intimidation and obstructing police, for their role in organizing the 2022 Freedom Convoy that snarled traffic in Ottawa and elsewhere as truckers and their allies voiced displeasure with pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, and other violations of personal freedom. They were both convicted of “mischief,” however, and Barber was found guilty of counseling others to disobey a court order. It’s for these crimes that the Canadian government wants to imprison them for the better part of a decade. That’s a stiff sentence, even for those who commit much more serious crimes in Canada.

“It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years,” Tristin Hopper wrote for the National Post. He pointed out that in March, prosecutors sought no more than six years for a British Columbia man who sexually assaulted a baby. In 2022, an Edmonton man received a five-year sentence for killing two peop

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