‘Someone planted the guns’: In Canada, a mugged, suspicious village blamed the police

COUTTS, Alberta — The village’s only restaurant offers a smile and two pamphlets, one decrying Covid-19 vaccines for children, the other saying the United Nations mission is supporting the creation of a ‘microchip society’ to ‘track and control”.

So pervasive is the belief that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a dictator in the making that even a senior official in the village admits it “might have” a flag telling Canada’s leaders where to go – roughly.

And many residents of the village of Coutts, Alberta, believe the biggest event to have happened here in recent memory – when police searched a local home in February and revealed a chilling cache of weapons – was a hoax committed by police to silence an anti-government protest.

“It could have been a conspiracy,” said Bill Emerson, who has lived across the street from the home that police were searching for four decades. The guns gave the government an excuse to suspend civil liberties, he said. “Maybe someone planted the guns.”

The police raid took place during the era of the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which began as a movement of truckers to contest a government vaccination order but expanded into a variety of anti-government complaints.

Seven months after the dramatic arms seizure by police in Coutts and after the protesters who had dug into the village for 17 days reluctantly moved away in their trucks and tractors, the Freedom Convoy is still here – in spirit and in philosophy.

The stark contrast between the mainstream account of what happened — police disarming a small group of protesters with violent intentions — and that fueled by a conspiracy — a government attempt to demonize the protesters — reflects a burgeoning polarization in Canadian sentiment society and a deepening of the expanse of unlawful ideology and misinformation.

Both trends have been reinforced by the coronavirus, but neither has weakened as the pandemic subsides.

The Freedom Convoy movement — which at one point aimed to replace the federal government with a governing committee of protesters, and which Mr. Trudeau dismissed as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” — is hardly a fringe group. Months later, it gets the support of one in four Canadians to a recent surveyand some of their beliefs have seeped into mainstream politics.

“We have crossed a Rubicon and there is no turning back,” said Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. “Canada hasn’t seen anything like this, certainly not in a long time. How do we deal with a movement that wants to dismantle democracy?”

Coutts is a small frontier village 185 miles southeast of Calgary cut into rolling fields of wheat, barley and canola that glow fluorescent yellow in summer.

Modest bungalows, a handful of shops, and a large Mormon temple line the dozens of streets.

Before last winter, the village was a faint claim to notoriety a mention of President Obama its baseball fields, which are right on the international border. “If you hit a home run,” he said, “there’s a good chance the ball will end up in Sweetgrass, Montana.”

Then, on a cold day last winter, hundreds of articulated lorries and trucks rumbled down the highway to the outskirts of the village and stopped, blocking all lanes leading to the normally busy border crossing.

They were a splinter group of the Freedom Convoy, a riotous rally that occupied the country’s capital, Ottawa, for three weeks.

Many of the movement’s organizers came from Alberta, home of the Canadian oil field and conservative populism, where the issues of liberty and distrust of government are old-fashioned.

In Coutts, the village’s only bar that was closed due to the pandemic has reopened as the headquarters.

Meanwhile, numerous provincial constables, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, kept watch. According to the mayor, in 17 days 552 officers were assigned to the village of just 224 residents.

On the 14th night of the protest, when a local church was holding a Sunday service at the bar, police in full military gear and armed with automatic weapons arrived and arrested two men in the crowd.

Later that night they executed a search warrant on a home where a local woman was harboring many protesters.

Within a few hours, the police arrested 14 people. Most were charged with mischief in excess of CA$5,000, or about US$3,700, and possession of a gun for a dangerous purpose. But four men face a far more serious charge – conspiracy to commit murder, which carries a life sentence.

Undercover officers witnessed the setup of what they believed to be a shipment of guns to Coutts, search warrants show. Police said the group was preparing for an armed confrontation with police. “It could have been deadly for citizens, protesters and officers,” said Curtis Zablocki, deputy commissioner of Alberta’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

A Photo of the armory They confiscated rifles, handguns, high-capacity magazines, ammunition and bulletproof vests.

All four men accused of conspiracy to murder are middle-aged workers from southern Alberta.

The day before the police raid, one of them, Jerry Morin, recorded a video on Facebook calling on his friends to help Coutts “hold the line.”

“There are no excuses,” said Mr Morin, a 40-year-old who installs and repairs electrical wiring. “This is war.”

His older sister Tina Shipley said he attended anti-mask rallies in the early days of the pandemic with his common-law wife, who is facing lesser charges in connection with the protest.

“They saw this as a violation of their freedoms and rights,” Ms Shipley said, adding that they sincerely believed the pandemic was a government hoax.

“He thinks he’s fighting for your rights,” she said.

It took less than a day after the arrests for new conspiracy theories to circulate, according to weary Coutts Mayor Jim Willett.

Some believed the radical protesters themselves were used by the police or the government. “Maybe they were paid to come and cause a problem,” said Beth McCoy, a retired customs agent who sat in her yard this summer sorting through children’s Valentines to be sent to protesters. “Are you really in prison?”

“There is a distrust among many people – a far-right belief that the police and the government cannot be trusted,” said Mr Willett, 74, who knows of just four villagers who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, including himself.

A particular dislike for the Federal Liberal Party and the Trudeau family has been ingrained in Alberta’s political culture since the 1980s, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau – Justin Trudeau’s father – instituted a short-lived national energy program which shared the region’s oil profits with the rest of Canada.

“Trudeau hates us,” said Lori Rolfe, Coutts’ chief administrative officer.

But the mistrust and conspiracy theories that have taken root in Coutts reflect a broader polarization of Canadian society.

The 25 percent of Canadians who support the Freedom Convoy are typically rural males who have no college education and identify as working class or poor, said Frank Graves, president of respected polling firm Ekos Research Associates. you consume much disinformation and disagree with the Trudeau administration’s stance on climate change, immigration and reconciliation with indigenous peoples, his firm’s polls show.

And they found a champion in the new leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre pledged making Canadians “the freest people in the world,” which echoes the language of the protests.

The men accused of conspiracy to murder remain in prison. Her trial is scheduled for next June.

Many Freedom Convoy supporters consider them fall types.

Some said they believed no guns were found at Coutts at all, that police had used a photo from another raid to sway public opinion against protesters and to justify the steps Mr Trudeau took to shut down the protest break up.

On the day of the raid, his government passed a sweeping emergency law that gave police sweeping powers to arrest protesters and ordered banks to freeze accounts linked to the convoy.

Federal Minister for Public Security Marco Mendicino referred to Coutts as part of the rationale.

“We’re talking about an organised, agile, knowledgeable group driven by an extremist ideology where strength makes right,” he told reporters.

“It was meant to manipulate the public into believing that,” said Sandra Burrows, another supporter of the Coutts protests. “It ended a peaceful rally by planting the guns.”

Marco Van Huigenbos, the main leader of the Coutts protests, is so convinced that at least two of the four men are innocent that he subsidizes their families with CA$10,000 a month. The money comes from leftover funds raised in Coutts – both from GoFundMe and from a donation box.

“They use these guys to send a message,” said Mr Huigenbos, a councilman and business owner from nearby Fort Macleod, who was one himself recently charged with mischief over 5,000 Canadian dollars. “There is political influence here.”

‘Someone planted the guns’: In Canada, a mugged, suspicious village blamed the police

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Walmart shoppers rush to the stores to find bargains under $5 as the chain takes on a big popular rival

Budget 2023 expected to unveil renters’ credit and third-level fee cut

New York subway workers ignored ‘bloody’ attack: lawsuit