The Royal Bank Sought to Treat Truckers as Terrorists

Will the David I. McKay, the President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, Apologize for Appointing Himself as Canada's Chief Arbiter of Terrorism?

The Royal Back of Canada’s CEO and President, David I. McKay, Advised Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chyrstia Freeland, to Designate the Truckers Convoy as Terrorists, to Seize Their Assets, and Impair Them

All signs point to the fact that David I. McKay, currently President and Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Bank of Canada, called on the Canadian government to designate members of the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy as “Terrorists.” In a conference call with the heads of financial institutions including Canada' big banks, Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, was told,

“you need to designate the group [the Freedom Convoy] as a terrorist group and seize their assets and impair them.”

This instruction to the Canadian government from Canada’s top banker was implemented. To Canada’s great shame to this day, what McKay so succinctly advised is exactly what did happened.

Some protestors were arrested as terrorists on Valentine’s Day of 2022. These arrests were being processed just as Freeland and PM Trudeau were issuing their “Emergency Act” suspending the normal workings of Canada’s constitution.

Based in these emergency measures, the Canadian government ordered the banks to seize the accounts of the Freedom Convoy Truckers, their helpers, their associates, and their supporters. The Trudeau government and the RCMP also went to work smearing the names of those that contributed money to facilitate the Freedom Convoy’s protest.

All the major Canadian banks were in on the deal to sabotage some of their customers by apprehending without any judicial oversight the personal funds of targeted people. Even before the Emergency Act the TD Bank had already jumped the gun. According to journalist Roxanne Halverson, TD banking officers had already worked with a judge to seize the accounts of two Truckers in Ottawa.

Halverson’s complete essay describing the financial sabotage of the Trucker’s political stance, is published below.

It is no small matter that it was the leadership of Canada’s banks who persuaded the political leadership of the emerging Canadian police state to declare the truckers as a terrorist group. Dirty tactics such as these are a staple in combatting the most effective political critics who criticize the elites in Third World dictatorships.

Some of the most dramatic outcomes of the project of declaring members of the Truckers Convoy to be terrorists, have been unfolding since 2022 in and around the sleepy court house of Lethbridge Alberta, currently my home town.

At the heart of this spectacle of impairment and impoverishment through criminalization has been the extended theatrics of a show trial featuring four men charged by the thought police in the RCMP and the Alberta Ministry of Justice. The four men had all taken part in early 2022 in the protests at the Alberta-Montana border crossing beside Coutts Alberta. Other locations of the Freedom Convoy protests included Windsor, Surrey (BC), Emerson (MB) and elsewhere spontaneously.

The basis of this political show trial located in the Lethbridge court house was the allegation that these four men conspired together to kill RCMP officers. It fell to the RCMP to prepare and assemble the proof that they were indeed the targets of contemplated murder. The supposed evidence put together by the RCMP proved not to be enough to persuade a jury that the accused men did conspire to murder cops.

All four men were denied bail in the two-year lead up to this murder trial where no one was murdered. The men were jailed in very rough remand facilities for about 800 days without being charged with anything. Welcome to the Canadian police state as conceived by the RBC in partnership with Chrystia Freeland.

The revelations about the meeting of the minds between Chrystia Freeland and the RBC’s CEO and Chief Terrorist expert, Dave McKay, took place in the course of the proceedings of the Public Order Emergency Commission. This Commission was chaired by Mr. Justice Paul Rouleau, the notorious Liberal Party chum of the Trudeau clan.

The task assigned to the Commission as a requirement of law, was to evaluate the legitimacy of the claims advanced by the Trudeau government to justify the invocation of the Emergency Act on Valentine’s Day of 2022. That invocation was subsequently declared “unconstitutional” in a ruling by a Federal Court Judge. On the order of Chrystia Freeland, the ruling was immediately appealed by the federal government.

In the POEC proceedings of November 24, Freeland was questioned by Brendan Miller, lawyer for the Convoy Organizers. In the course of the questioning Freeland’s notes were shown on a screen in a powerpoint presentation.

Commissioner Paul S. Rouleau, Public Hearings, The Public Order Emergency Commission, Vol. 30, Held at Library and Archives Canada, Bambrick Room, 24 November 2022

https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-30-November-24-2022.pdf pp. 86-87

With Freeland’s own incriminating words in front of her, Brendan Miller, a lawyer for the Convoy Organizers, discussed her phone call with RBC CEO’s Dave McKay and with the other bankers in the prelude to the invocation of the Emergency Act on Feb. 14.

Brendan Miller, Lawyer for Marco Van Huigenbos and for the Freedom Convoy Organizers

Brendan Miller came to Lethbridge on January 9 and 10 to represent his client, Marco Van Huigenbos, former town councillor of Fort McLeod Alberta. Like Freeland, Mr. Van Huigenbos was also a witness asked to testify in Judge Rouleau’s Commission in Ottawa in late 2022.

In Feb. of 2024, two years after the Trucker’s dramatic protest at the Alberta-Montana border, Mr. Van Huigenbos, Alex Van Herk and Gerhard Janzen were arrested and charged. They were each charged with one count of mischief in a second trial running parallel to the conspiracy-to-commit murder trial at the Lethbridge court house.

Something went terribly wrong with the conspiracy-to-commit-murder trial. This conspiracy-to-commit-murder procedure can be seen as the main effort to advertise to the world that the Truckers Freedom Convoy was a cover for a terrorist movement. Two of the men in the Coutts Four pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were released from jail before the show trial took place.

The Coutts Four thus became the Coutts Two. So the conspiracy claims fuelling this farce of a process had to be altered, discrediting the original story fed to the public by the CBC and other venues responsible for conducting the trial-by-media.

It is pretty clear that the secondary charges brought two years after the Coutts protests against the Van Huigenbos, Van Herk, and Janzen— the Coutts Three— was to draw attention away from the breakdown of the conspiracy-to-commit-murder procedure. The trial of the Coutts Two neared its end when the jury found that Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert were NOT guilty of a conspiracy to murder cops.

In the conclusion of the trial of the Coutts Three, Judge Yamauchi sentenced Mr. Huigenbos with a 4 month jail sentence and Mr. Janzen with a 90 day community service sentence.

After the jury came to its verdict on the conspiracy-to-commit matter, Judge David Labrenz sentenced both men before him to serve six-and-a-half year sentences. This lengthy sentence suggested that the Coutts Two men really were terrorists.

This main trial— this murder trial without murders— involves a long story which has been told elsewhere, including by Ms. Halverson, Autonomous Truck(ers) and me on Substack.

Marco Van Huigenbos at the Lethbridge Court House

The marathon trial process in the Lethbridge court house found parallels in Ottawa. Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two leaders of the Ottawa expression of the Freedom Convoy movement, will be sentenced in March. Mr. Van Herk has yet to be sentenced by Judge Yamauchi.

Both Lich and Barber have been subjected to their own versions of the terrorist treatment that RBC President Dave McKay helped initiate.

In my previous Substack essay entitled “Covering Up for Covid CRIMES,” I include in my analysis a consideration of the role of the judiciary in the array of crimes I highlight. While I concentrate on the sentencing of the Coutts Three with a particular spotlight on Mr. Huigenbos, I also present an overview of the Coutts 2, 3 and 4 cases at the Lethbridge court house. These proceedings all emanate from the Coutts protest between January 29 and Feb. 15 of 2022.

A unifying attribute of all these proceedings involves the many roles of Crown Prosector, Stephen Johnston. Having observed the words and actions of Mr. Johnston throughout these various proceedings, I have come to suspect that he has been charged with the task of surrounding the Truckers’Freedom Convoy with an aura of terrorism as well as criminality.

Given that my main subject of my previous essay is the sentencing hearing led by Judge Keith Yamauchi, much of my analysis focuses on him.

Judge Yamauchi was thoughtful, convivial, and well informed as well he should have been, on the sentencing of others convicted over the years in various types of blockades.

I was surprised, however, by how ill-informed Judge Yamauchi showed himself to be when it came to the political and legal context of the manufactured COVID crisis. He suffered from limitations imposed by many of the same kind of blind spots as those afflicting Mr. Johnston and Judge David Labrenz.

None of them seem to have done much homework to recognize the larger controversies swirling worldwide around the COVID saga. These controversies involve important questions concerning their own professional activities in perpetrating what I am calling the Covid CRIMES.

For instance, in discussing the case of Marco Van Huigenbos, Judge Yamauchi takes for granted that “the majority of Canadians” are with him, not Marco. The Judge may well be wrong based on his vision of a rule of law with no room whatsoever for civil disobedience.

Both Stephen Johnston and Judge Yamauchi emphasized they would have no patience for the kind of strategies famously employed by, for instance, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King in pursuing social justice. Moreover, like Freeland, Judge Yamauchi, perceived that the Truckers stance was an attack on the economic wellbeing of Canada.

Judge Yamauchi did not see the Freedom Conoy movement as a legitimate response aimed at countering the wanton destruction to the worldwide economy brought about by useless lockdowns, unnecessary business failures, and massive increases to unemployment.

Apparently the celebrity virus was manageable at Big Box stores like Costco and Wal-Mart, but not in small mom and pop businesses that were shut down by the millions worldwide during the reign of COVID.

Certainly none of the Crown officials I have seen in the Lethbridge court rooms have shown any interest in the magnitude of the health issues that they have been wrongfully shoved to the side. Who will be held accountable for the entirely predictable deaths and illnesses imposed on the global population by the clot shot injections? Some of these issues involve real murders, not abstract theories about conspiracies to commit murder.

According to Roxanne Halverson, the government followed up its massive overreach on the COVID scare by vicious overreach in a misguided attempt to discredit and quash the Freedom Convoy movement. As many of us see it, the Truckers’ movement advanced the public interest whereas the government, the media, the medical system, and some ill-informed judges attacked the public interest in really devastating ways. As some of us see it, that process continues yet.

In the words of Roxanne Halverson, instead of coming to terms with the role of government in “their draconian, freedom sucking, divisive, impotent and unrealistic COVID restrictions… they chose to blame and punish those who came to challenge them and speak for a vast majority of Canadians.”

From my perspective many people opposed to government injection policies now and in the past do so because of their existential efforts to keep themselves and their families well and alive.

Thanks to Ray McGinnis for pointing out Ms. Halverson’s essay first published on 2 December, 2022. I missed it when it first appeared and I’m trying to make amends now. It would be good to see David I. McKay make his way over to Lethbridge from the RBC headquarters to apologize to many who have suffered the consequence of his haste to apply allegations of terrorism to life-and-death political decision-making in Canada. How many have been killed so far?

Convoy Bank Account Freeze Should Send a Chill Down the Spine of Every Canadian

Citizens should be afraid, be very afraid, to quote Wednesday Adams, but this is no joke

ROXANNE HALVERSON

DEC 02, 2022

At the Public Order Emergencies Commission Inquiry we heard a litany of reasons for the Trudeau government’s draconian decision to freeze the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy members. The careless nature of the order and along with the rationale for doing it, which you could, if you excuse the pun, drive a truck through, bespeaks a regime teetering on the edge of authoritarianism. It wasn’t enough that the Convoy’s crowdfunding sites that had raised well over $6 million from its supporters were shut down due to nefarious accusations that the Convoy was violent and being heavily financed by foreign actors in the US and Russia. In truth, testimonies from FINTRAC, and the owners of the crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe and GiveSendGo, made it clear that over 85 percent of the funds raised came from individual Canadian Convoy supporters who made anywhere from $20 to $100 donations. Despite this, the Trudeau government decided it had to go after their personal bank accounts too.

Here are some things every Canadian should think about, regardless of how they feel about the Freedom Convoy, when personal bank accounts became the government’s targets.

Any government in a democratic country should never have the right, nor should it bestow upon itself the right, to seize the private property of private citizens, without judicial oversight, or charging those citizens with anything, simply because they were involved in a protest that disagreed with that government.

Every single Canadian needs to understand the enormity of this unprecedented action and lengths this government was willing to go to, to punish and intimidate people who dared to challenge its policies through peaceful protest. Something that is every Canadian’s constitutional right. Be afraid, be very afraid, because the next time it could be you.

When Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia made her announcement on February 14th, that the bank accounts of Convoy members would be frozen, when they invoked the Emergencies Act, she said this gave her government broad ‘new’ powers. This included the authority to share ‘relevant’ information with banks and other financial service providers to enable them to work together to put a stop to the funding of the blockades (referring to the border blockades). “This is about following the money,” according to Freeland. There were a couple of problems with this. To begin with, at the time of the announcement, the border blockades that were occurring at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario; Coutts, Alberta; and Emerson, Manitoba; were already resolved, or the government had been advised that they were in the process of being settled, so any threat to the trade economy or Canada’s reputation had been extinguished. These were also the only technically ‘illegal’ blockades that were occurring. Second, as we would soon learn, there was no ‘money’ to follow.

Government Rationale and Litany of Excuses

At the Inquiry we heard from Freeland that they first froze bank accounts to ‘make sure’ people would leave the protest as peacefully as possible and/or push Convoy ‘influencers and leaders” to leave Ottawa, before police intervention was necessary. We all know that didn’t work, and if they thought it was such a useful tool, why did they have the police at the ready to lay waste to the protesters?

This was because, according to Freeland, she also didn’t “want to see a child with blood running down their face.” What exactly was she implying? That the police they would send to break up the protest–because they did send them–would attack children?

No, they just trampled people with horses, beat up injured Afghan vets, arrested people and then dumped them like trash in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, randomly smashed truck windows, pepper sprayed independent journalists and used rubber bullets to quell a crowd that for all intents and purposes, never tried to strike back. Did she think that Convoy members wouldn’t protect their children or might possibly hurt their own children, and if she did, why? Wasn’t there some discussion to have the Children’s Aid remove the children before the police began their siege to ensure their safety, or was that perhaps to threaten the truckers even more? Either way, her melodramatic thinking seems a bit flawed. The children were happy and healthy and had bouncy castles for heaven’s sake.

The question is, how were Convoy members supposed to go home if they had no money, or couldn’t use their credit cards to buy gas or food to get there? Very few of the 257 people who had their accounts frozen were even notified, as there were no formal processes to tell them. They would come to that terrifying conclusion once their credit card was denied at a gas station when they were trying to fill up their vehicles to leave town, or if they tried to withdraw cash from an ATM. I use the word terrifying, because it would have been to them. It should be, to any thinking Canadian, regardless of their political leanings, to realize that a government would do this to its own citizens for merely exercising their constitutional right to protest against that said government.

Freeland also somehow claimed that this draconian move was taken to save Canadian jobs and the economy. What jobs she wasn’t clear on, given that hundreds of thousands of Canadians were out of work long before the Convoy arrived in Ottawa.

This was, of course, due to the endless lockdowns and shuttering of businesses, and the travel restrictions that governments had engaged in for two long years in a futile attempt to fight COVID. The Trudeau government’s vaccine mandates, the very mandates that were at the heart of Convoy’s protest, had put even more Canadians out of work. Many doctors and nurses, university professors, members of the military, police, airline employees and general government workers either lost their jobs, or were forced out of them, for exercising their constitutional right and something called ‘informed consent’ to make a decision not to take the vaccine for reasons of their own.

And let’s not forget the truckers themselves, who had lost their livelihoods because they could no longer cross the border into the US without having to spend two weeks in quarantine before re-entering Canada, thereby crippling their ability to operate and make a profit. Yet, this was something these same truckers had been doing at the height of the pandemic–unvaccinated–for the previous two years. The same truckers who were hailed as heroes by the very Prime Minister who was now deriding and punishing them–suddenly they went from heroes to zeroes, or to use his words misogynists, racists, extremists, and white supremacists.

As for saving Canada’s economy, it would appear that two years of lockdowns and the shuttering of businesses had not affected the economy at all. The shutting down of pipelines and the bulk of Canada’s oil and natural gas industry, in the name of climate alarmism, had nothing to do with a weakened economy. The travel restrictions that had crippled the airline and travel and tourism industry didn’t impact the economy in the least. The Liberal government’s spending trillions of dollars it didn’t have, which resulted in the biggest hike in inflation in the country 40 years, wasn't impacting the economy or causing ordinary Canadians to suffer in any way. Instead it was truckers blocking the border for a few days, which we have since learned had minimal impact on the economy, and a bunch of people exercising their right to peacefully protest the government in the Canadian capital that was responsible for crippling the economy.

Then there was that ludicrous and completely unfounded CBC claim that foreign money – quite likely Russian – was behind the protest. Yet, Freeland took them at their word on that. Why wouldn’t she, after all her government was paying them $1.5 billion a year to be at its beckon call. The next justification was to blame it on the banks. Apparently most of the CEOs of Canada's five big banks were pressuring the government to do something to stop the Convoy. It seems they were so concerned about losing investment dollars they were demanding the government find a reason to allow them to shut down the bank accounts of their own customers I might add. A few suggested the government designate the Convoy as “terrorists,” so they could “seize their assets and impair them.” Those were the words Freeland jotted down in her notes as she was speaking to ‘Dave”, during her conference call with all the bank CEOs.

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Royal Bank CEO David McKay thought the government should designate the Convoy as terrorists

That ‘Dave’ was David I. McKay, CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada. Meanwhile the TD Bank had already frozen two ‘suspect’ bank accounts, after getting a court order on its own. Freeland told the Inquiry that one CEO even told her a US investor had said that he wouldn’t invest one red cent in ‘your banana republic’ in Canada.

Freeland characterized this as ‘heartstopping’ for her, because it made her realize how much the protest was affecting the Canadian economy, So it was job losses and the economy and now it was the bankers who were worried about investments. My goodness what a powerhouse those low-life truckers must have been to cause such a ruckus among the ruling class. It was just a day after that call with the bankers that the government invoked the Act. But the icing on the cake, in this display of feigned urgency was that Freeland felt, as did the bank's CEOs, that it was unfair to ask the banks to take responsibility for the government’s decision to invoke the Act and freeze bank accounts, albeit, at their behest. So she decided it was better that the government play the role of villain in all of this. So very, very, generous of her… to the bankers.

Given this, it is not surprising the remarkable ease with which the banks went about their business of betraying their customers, without challenging the government in any way. It was, after all, what they had asked for, and apparently even demanded, in the first place. The sad reality of this whole exercise was that the amount seized from the almost 260 Convoy bank accounts was a modest $8 million dollars. This amounts to around $31,000 per account, underscoring the fact that those involved in organizing the protest were hardly well-to-do. For some, it could well have put their entire life savings in jeopardy.

So, the once sacred right of citizens to freely access their own hard earned money, except in extraordinary instances where a court order has been issued or Canada Revenue Service has asked for a freeze, was breached for this paltry sum on the whims of millionare bank CEOs and the Trudeau government. Additionally, having one’s name on the list the RCMP gave to the banks, may prove to be a lifelong black mark for those targeted, according to the Canadian Bankers Association. The government’s lack of direction about what should be done with all the personal information that was distributed to the banking industry after the Act was rescinded also raises significant privacy issues. But I guess neither the government nor the banks, gave any thought to any of this in their desperate attempt to ‘save’ the Canadian economy.

This is a very sad tale of government overreach, by a government that had already done that for two long years. It was the very reason the Convoy had come to Ottawa in the first place. But instead of even trying to come to terms with how this government with their draconian, freedom sucking, divisive, impotent and unrealistic COVID restrictions, had brought this on themselves, they chose to blame and punish those who came to challenge them and speak for a vast majority of Canadians.

They chose to silence, economically cripple and punish them. Given this, ordinary Canadians must choose between being afraid or to being brave, as brave as the Freedom Convoy was. Let this government know how disgusted you are with their heavy handedness, because depending on your choice, you could be next.

See