If you needed money but had none, fighting the law isn’t usually the best way to solve it because the odds aren’t in your favor. Sonny Curtis wrote a whole hit song about this.
The key organizers of the Great Honkening, a month-long siege of Canada’s capital city two years ago by cray-cray conspiracy clowns with keys to commercial vehicles who got it into their craniums this would somehow lead to keys to the prime minister’s office, are taking a novel approach to a civil suit brought by 23-year-old civil servant Zexi Li on behalf of pissed-off Ottawa residents seeking roughly $220 million in damages by saying the local police board should have to pay instead for cops not doing enough to stop them.
That’s a lot of donuts.
Lawyers for Chris Barber, Tamara Lich and 10 other hoseheads in the class action recently filed a third-party claim against the Ottawa Police Services Board arguing the po-po were derelict in duty and therefore they should be the ones to pay the tab for any losses or damages suffered by inconvenienced Ottawans rather than these poor, misunderstood freedumb fighters. The new tactic comes after an attempt to dismiss the lawsuit under Ontario’s anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) legislation failed to persuade the judge it was frivilous and against public interest.
This is a bit like if convicted January 6th rioters tried to sue Nikki Haley Nancy Pelosi for providing insufficient security to stop them from sacking the Capitol.
Despite Taylor Swift being the red-pilled radical right’s current bête noire for — like Green Day — declining to be part of the MAGA agenda, they’re essentially using her slapper “Look What You Made Me Do” as an ad hoc legal defense. Call it the Tay-Tay Gambit.
The argument goes, apart from “a small number” of around 40 big rigs to park in front of Parliament, along with plenty more on two stretches of nearby highways, there was no actual plan to barricade O-Town’s downtown with vehicles and, in fact, it was entirely the coppers’ fault for making them take over residential streets.
“But for some reason, the Ottawa police decided to change the plan,” convoy consigliere James Manson told the CBC. “And so our argument will be that if that had not taken place, if the trucks had parked where they all had understood they were going to park, then there wouldn’t have been any trucks downtown, and therefore there couldn’t have been a nuisance caused the way that the plaintiffs are claiming it.”
The convoy’s legal eagles are also claiming police were negligent for:
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Being overwhelmed by the number of vehicles despite organizers’ best efforts to warn them.
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Failing to adequately respond to intelligence and news reports that “widely recognized the size and scale of the protest.”
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Placing “inexperienced officers in leadership positions.”
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And not telling these dumbasses to get out of town “when it became known they would not leave” on their own volition.
While it wasn’t nearly an Uvalde-level police bunglement, there’s no question cops dropped the ball. These barbarians at the gate weren’t the exactly the Spanish Inquisition; law enforcement should’ve expected and been more ready for them, especially as these loons had already rolled out a dress rehearsal with the United We Roll/Yellow Vest protests a few years earlier before the pandemic gave the crybaby movement a shot in the arm. (Figuratively, not literally, obv.) It doesn’t help that many cops were clearly ideological fellow travelers just doing their jobs and willing to bring them coffee and pose for selfies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ultimately evoked the Emergencies Act for the country’s first time to finally get rid of them. A federal court recently declared Trudeau using the nuclear option infringed on protesters’ Charter rights, and the ruling has since emboldened convoy types to gear up for another round of shenanigans.
But it’s utter bullshit to claim police didn’t tell them to leave given they’d already handed out notices on vehicles saying “You must leave the area now.” Not a lot of ambiguity there.
Li’s lawyer, the appropriately named Paul Champ, put it this way in response:
I’m not sure if it necessarily is the place of the protesters themselves to say, ‘Well, [police] made me do it.’ I’m not sure if it necessarily flies to blame someone else for your own unlawful activity, but we’ll see how the Ottawa police respond.
So far they haven’t. Both Lich and Barber are also facing criminal charges of mischief, intimidation, and counseling others to break the law in a trial that was supposed to be wrapped up last October but is currently in legal limbo due to court delays. If they do end up being sent back to jail, it may be some consolation they won’t be forced to break rocks in the hot sun like the unfortunate narrator of “I Fought the Law.”
