EXCLUSIVE: Ezra Levant interviews the mother of one of the Coutts Four

Tomorrow the Coutts Four are back in court in Lethbridge. I’ll be there to report on the proceedings, along with our reporter Robert Kraychik.

Robert’s done a great job covering the trial of Tamara Lich in Ottawa, so he’s got a lot of experience with these political prosecutions. That’s what they really are — political trials. There is no public interest in pursuing these charges. In the case of Tamara Lich, it’s to punish her for leading the greatest peaceful protest in modern Canadian history. Her real crime was embarrassing Justin Trudeau.

The Coutts Four — two of whom have already pleaded guilty to minor offences — are a bit different. They’re important to Trudeau because he needed a pretext to invoke the Emergencies Act, and the peaceful and patriotic trucker protests simply didn’t provide a legal or political basis for martial law.

Right before Trudeau suspended our civil liberties in February of 2022, his RCMP announced that they had discovered a “conspiracy to commit murder” at the Coutts border blockade. Four men faced extremely serious charges, and the RCMP had a spectacular press conference where they even showed some of the weapons they claimed the men planned to use. They were mainly hunting rifles, the kind that most people in rural Alberta have, but it was enough to terrify the Toronto-based media.

Still, it was so startling that the men at the Coutts blockade decided to pack it in — they didn’t want to be associated with guns or violence at all.

The Coutts Four were denied bail and have been in prison for more than two years. Two of them pleaded guilty to minor charges — though it’s hard not to wonder if they would have signed any confession just to get out of prison and back to their families.

But what about the two remaining men, Chris Carbert and Tony Olienick? 

A few days ago I sat down with Chris’s mother, Betty Carbert, for a heart-to-heart conversation about the protests, the criminal charges, and what her son Chris is really like.

Of course, every mother thinks their son is innocent — that’s a mom’s job. But my job as a journalist is to follow the facts wherever they lead.And as we learn more and more about the case against Chris Carbert, I’m of the opinion that the charges against him were trumped up for political reasons, so Trudeau could have a pretext for invoking the Emergencies Act.