The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Canadian Injustice with Gord Magil

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now as we often cover on Lotus Eaters, Western governments, 0.98

00:00:05.520 especially in the Anglosphere, seem to have decided that things like democracy, free speech,

00:00:10.780 thinking for yourself are very outdated concepts and in order to protect democracy, by which they

00:00:15.580 mean themselves, they're going to have to come down on us increasingly hard if we exercise our

00:00:20.240 ability to think or question the narrative in any way. I've recently been made aware of a

00:00:26.800 particularly unfortunate case pertaining to the Canadian truckers, which of course we supported

00:00:31.900 very much. And in order to speak about that, I've got Gord McGill on the line. Gord,

00:00:37.740 thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me, sir. Pleasure to be here.

00:00:42.060 So as I understand, you work Canadian, you become American, and you're also a trucker. Have I got

00:00:49.340 that right? Mostly, yeah. I haven't got my American citizenship yet, but I have been living here for

00:00:56.200 almost 10 years. Married an American lady. We moved here full time in 2016. I have been a trucker my

00:01:03.860 entire life. I went home to support the Freedom Convoy and show solidarity during that epic,

00:01:12.160 very based and very legitimate protest in 2022. And I've sort of been writing about it ever since.

00:01:18.400 And on your Twitter handle, you've got this photo of you with, you know, I don't want to call it a

00:01:25.040 truck because it looks more like a bloody train to me. You don't seriously drive that thing, do you?

00:01:30.120 I used to. That photo's from Australia. I've spent some time down under, and I was driving what the

00:01:38.060 Aussies call a road train. So it's a triple road train through Western Australia. I was working for a

00:01:43.340 company in Perth and going up north to places like Newman and Dampier, Carratha, Broome, sort of outback,

00:01:51.360 as they say. Right. Because I often drive past trucks on my way into Swindon from somewhere nice.

00:01:57.380 And the trucks we got here, they're like one truck, but that thing was like four, five, or six,

00:02:02.380 or something. I mean, it's a triple road train. So three 45 foot trailers. They do have larger ones

00:02:09.340 that service the mines out of the Pilbara region and various other locations in Australia.

00:02:14.740 I wasn't driving one of those, but I mean, three is enough.

00:02:17.780 But what's that like to drive? I mean, I'm just looking at it. It looks bloody terrifying to me.

00:02:23.420 I don't know. I guess when you've been driving truck for as long as I have, it's not that big of a

00:02:30.220 deal. You actually drive slower. It's a lot more relaxing. When you're in the outback in high

00:02:35.560 temperatures, it's really hard on the equipment when you're towing that much weight. So you drive

00:02:41.220 slower. You tend to drop a gear or two, do about, you know, 80 kilometers an hour rather than a

00:02:46.540 hundred. And, you know, just, just, just take her slow and easy. You have to be ginger on the 0.93

00:02:52.940 equipment when you're in the outback. Nobody's coming to help you if you break down, like you

00:02:56.960 basically have to fix everything yourself, change your own tires.

00:02:59.640 Well, how long does it take to stop the thing?

00:03:01.340 Oh, I mean, you know, there's lots of brakes with that many wheels on the ground. It's

00:03:06.380 actually not as long as you'd think.

00:03:08.160 Oh, okay. Oh, right. Okay. Um, yeah, well, uh, it must be a fascinating career. I mean,

00:03:13.420 I know, I know we've got a couple of, um, a good number of truckers who, who listened to

00:03:16.640 Lotus Eaters and they, they sort of put one of our podcasts on, which, you know, that just,

00:03:20.920 that feels quite nice to me listening to me and, and having the air stream through the

00:03:24.820 windows and the sun on one of your arms. I mean, that, that feels, you know, that, that's

00:03:29.580 got to be the life, isn't it? Uh, the job certainly has its charms. And speaking of

00:03:34.320 Lotus Eaters fans, uh, there's a gentleman in England who's been on my podcast once.

00:03:38.620 His name is Graham Brown. He has a sub stack called the Louriest. Uh, I think he's, I think,

00:03:43.800 I think he's friends with you guys. So g'day Graham. How are you doing?

00:03:47.380 Very good, Graham. I, I, I think he might be one of our subscribers. I know I've met a couple

00:03:51.880 of them, but, uh, I have to look up that blog. That's excellent. Right. So, um, you're coming

00:03:56.400 to talk to us about the case of, um, Tony Olenek and, uh, Chris, uh, I think Cabo, I think it is.

00:04:03.000 Yes. So, yeah. So I've, I, I, I've looked into some details of this and it's pretty horrifying.

00:04:09.000 Do you want to take us through, um, what happened there? And it all sort of started, did it with a,

00:04:13.960 with a Canadian truckers program, which, as you said, was an entirely correct and based

00:04:17.880 protest against government overreach. Right. So let's, uh, let us, let us get in the time

00:04:23.200 machine and go back to the COVID times. Yes. Um, if I had a time machine, that is the last

00:04:28.840 point I'd go back to. I'd rather go back to the bloody dinosaurs wandering around than that, but

00:04:34.900 okay. Yeah. So COVID happens. We all know what went down there. Um, in Canada, the, uh, COVID regime 0.82

00:04:45.020 as manifested under Justin Trudeau was particularly harsh. Um, Justin Trudeau was, uh, pretty extreme

00:04:55.060 in his rhetoric against those citizens who had chosen to, you know, uh, adapt to COVID with their

00:05:02.100 sort of own approach to it. Um, you know, some people took vaccines, some people did not.

00:05:07.200 And Trudeau was very harsh on those who did not. In fact, uh, he orchestrated what I would call a

00:05:14.180 system of medical apartheid where, uh, federally regulated industries, figure federally regulated

00:05:20.800 jobs. You had no choice. Um, you could not get on an aircraft. You could not board a train. You could

00:05:27.040 not use any federally regulated transport if you did not produce a vaccination certificate. And in a

00:05:33.140 country, the size of Canada, which has got six time zones, it's the second largest country by landmass

00:05:38.180 in the world. Um, a lot of people who live in the far North and the Arctic, uh, there's not that much

00:05:43.620 medical care available in the North, uh, preventing people from getting on an airplane might be a death

00:05:49.460 sentence for them, uh, over and above all the other stuff, right? Like COVID as it manifested in many

00:05:54.820 countries was, you know, much the same, lots of restrictions, lots of fear. And in Canada, it was just,

00:06:00.920 it was really bad. So, uh, January, 2022 comes along and Trudeau and his transportation minister

00:06:09.180 decide, uh, with no scientific or logical rationale to impose yet another restriction this time on

00:06:17.960 truckers who are traveling back and forth into the United States of America, basically saying that if

00:06:23.700 they did not get a vaccination every single time they came back over the border from the United States,

00:06:29.140 they would have to quarantine for two weeks. Now, this makes no sense because up to that point,

00:06:34.660 truck drivers, American and Canadian had been pretty much the backbone of the economy because

00:06:40.160 everybody else is hiding at home, getting their free money from the government, hanging out on their

00:06:44.860 laptops and their pajamas, but the material reality of society still had to keep going.

00:06:50.360 Truckers were part of that and truckers were still working, uh, working under hours of service

00:06:55.760 exemptions. So the government said, not only can you keep working, but you can work harder.

00:07:00.960 The American government removed hours of service legislation. They basically said you can work as

00:07:06.500 hard as you want. And then at the same time, uh, highway rest areas were closed. Truck stops were

00:07:12.440 closed. You would show up at a facility and the people that work, they were afraid of you. They would

00:07:17.140 treat you as like a vector of disease. Drivers were like prevented from using any facilities,

00:07:22.800 right? So truckers are literally working twice as hard as normal. There's some of the only people

00:07:28.060 that are still working. And then all of the services to help truckers were closed, right?

00:07:33.900 Then Trudeau and his people come along and say, no, no, no, no, no. If you don't take the juice,

00:07:38.860 you're basically out of a job. So to any thinking person, like this is extremely offensive, right?

00:07:45.640 So the freedom convoy was born out of this situation. Um, some people in Alberta, some

00:07:52.160 people in Ontario organized online. It sort of spread like wildfire online. It became a sort of

00:07:57.960 distributed, spontaneous, and completely leaderless thing. I think, uh, I think the number of convoys

00:08:05.320 that participated in arriving in the city of Ottawa was 13 and just thousands of trucks, people from all

00:08:11.440 over the country, but Ottawa was not the only location. There was a number of freedom convoy

00:08:16.580 protest sites. There was the one in the city of Ottawa. There was one at the border crossing between

00:08:21.320 Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Uh, there was another one in Manitoba at the border crossing

00:08:27.120 into North Dakota. And then there was another one in Alberta. There's a pretty major border crossing at

00:08:32.360 a little town called Coots, which is about a four and a half, five hour drive South of the city of

00:08:37.720 Calgary, right on the border with Montana. And, uh, this story we're going to discuss starts in

00:08:43.760 Coots. So at the Coots border crossing, much like the one in Ottawa, a number of trucks, they kind of,

00:08:51.360 they, you know, it's said that they blocked off the border, which is sort of not necessarily a hundred

00:08:56.980 percent true. Um, they had their trucks lined up on either side of the road. Um, the border crossing

00:09:02.800 was only officially closed for about three days out of the three weeks that the protest site was

00:09:07.980 there. And was it, was it closed by trucks blocking it? Or was it closed by the Canadian

00:09:12.480 government? Well, depends on who you ask. Uh, the Canadian border services agency officially closed

00:09:19.460 it for three days in February. Yes. There was a bunch of trucks there. Yes. They had slowed it down,

00:09:24.400 but there was also two other border crossings within half an hour in either direction. So like the board,

00:09:30.020 the border was never technically really closed. There was always an option to get across could

00:09:35.320 still get across. Yeah. I mean, if they took a small detour, yep. And then the actual closure of

00:09:41.200 the highway where the highway for Alberta provincial highway four was actually closed, was that the next

00:09:47.500 community North of the place called milk river and the RCMP basically barricaded it off and nobody

00:09:53.020 could come or go on highway four at that location. That was care of the government. So this protest,

00:09:59.700 uh, goes on and you know, as, as the, as the protests across Canada were, you know, set in,

00:10:10.420 right. So like the truckers showed up in Ottawa on January 29th. Um, they were in Alberta and Manitoba

00:10:17.060 and all these other places around the same time. Um, Justin Trudeau is under pressure from the American

00:10:23.060 government because the backups at the border, specifically the one in Ontario were starting to

00:10:28.640 cost the American economy, a lot of money, uh, sort of a repeat of September 11th, when they

00:10:33.440 closed the border, because so many parts, the American Canadian economies are so intertwined

00:10:38.480 and they have, uh, you know, just in time delivery for automotive parts that are built in factories

00:10:43.240 in Canada. Then they go to factories in the U S to assemble cars. You know, it's, it's, it's 24 seven.

00:10:48.860 There's always has to be great moving in order to keep all that stuff going.

00:10:52.340 So, um, Pete Buttigieg, uh, who was the secretary of transportation at the time under Joe Biden

00:10:59.320 is in meetings with Trudeau and his people with Christia Freeland. All the documentation of this

00:11:05.380 stuff is publicly available. Um, it was all reviewed during the public order emergency commission,

00:11:10.260 which reviewed the imposition of the emergencies act by Trudeau. It's all there. You can all go look

00:11:15.840 at it yourself. And, uh, basically Biden and Buttigieg were leaning very heavily on Trudeau

00:11:22.820 to get the borders, like those border crossings unblocked. Right. Even though there was ways

00:11:28.300 around it, like even at Detroit and, uh, Windsor, you could go North to Sarnia, Ontario and cross the

00:11:35.440 border there. There's another major border crossing an hour North of Detroit that everybody was still

00:11:40.240 using. It was still open. So like at no point was it ever completely closed or was it ever,

00:11:46.740 you know, yes, a problem, yes, delays, but at no point anywhere, was it ever completely closed?

00:11:54.000 Um, Trudeau is having these meetings with, uh, the American government. And at the same time,

00:12:01.580 uh, you know, they're, they're trying to figure out ways to clean these protests out. Like,

00:12:06.440 you know, it's, it's looking bad for Trudeau. Trudeau is a venal evil person who doesn't like to be 0.99

00:12:12.820 told no, but at the same time, they never sent out any of his representatives to talk to people at 0.65

00:12:17.740 the convoy. So in Alberta, there was no communication between the government. No, the city of Ottawa talked

00:12:27.360 to the protesters in Ottawa, but from the federal government, there was nothing. Right. Um, yeah.

00:12:32.720 Well, I remember, I remember watching the protests at the time and I distinctly remember a whole bunch

00:12:38.720 of, I mean, I know you didn't exactly have leaders, but you kind of had leaders. And I remember

00:12:43.220 distinctly a whole bunch of times from saying, you know, we want to have a dialogue. We want to have

00:12:46.900 a communication. Correct. Yeah. There was, there was, there was always, always an open, open,

00:12:53.860 you know, basically an open invitation from protesters. Hey, come talk to us about this. Come talk to us

00:12:58.300 about this and Trudeau just refused because it's, you know, it's our democracy, right? Yeah. So

00:13:02.800 Coots, Alberta, um, the government sends in undercover officers to case the joint, right?

00:13:11.960 Just to sort of like see what's happening. And, you know, rather than communicate directly,

00:13:16.240 the government decides to communicate through subterfuge. So they send in a bunch of, uh,

00:13:21.640 young female undercover officers to the Coots protest site and start talking to people.

00:13:28.080 And they specifically start, uh, uh, listening to Tony Olianek. They don't have wires on them.

00:13:34.280 They have no recording devices. They don't have video cameras, nothing hidden. They're just,

00:13:38.260 they're just listening and taking notes. And then, um, they basically come to the conclusion,

00:13:43.740 the undercover officers that Tony Olianek and some of the other people there are ready to fight to

00:13:48.520 the death and want to have a revolution. And, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're,

00:13:52.280 they're, they're gonna, they're, they're an imminent threat. So they obtain wiretaps. They

00:13:57.300 get an, what's called an imminent harm wiretap, which means they have 24 hours to listen in on their

00:14:02.060 phones. And that wiretap does not require a warrant because it's imminent harm, right? They put an

00:14:08.440 imminent harm wiretap on a bunch of guys' phones at Coots, Alberta, and they get nothing,

00:14:13.640 no actionable evidence, no rhetoric, nothing. And then they leave that wiretap on,

00:14:18.520 for a couple more days, which is illegal without actually getting another separate proper warrant.

00:14:24.000 Anyway, the, long story short, the government decides that these guys in Alberta are going

00:14:30.520 to be their scapegoats. Uh, the police raid the site on the evening of February 13th, uh, 2022,

00:14:38.220 the night before Justin Trudeau invoked the emergencies act, which resulted in the bank account

00:14:44.400 freezings and, uh, all the fun stuff downstream of that. I mean, I just quickly add, I mean,

00:14:49.560 that is so typical of the way Western governments are going. They, they did, they, they have moved

00:14:54.880 from a model of, of genuine democracy to cattle management, where they're basically just kind

00:14:59.000 of trying to keep us under control. And because those of us who push back are not actually doing

00:15:04.920 anything wrong other than exercising what used to be democratic rights. Instead, they go with this

00:15:10.820 sort of, um, um, sort of anarcho tyranny where they will pick out a handful of individuals

00:15:16.260 and just ran road them with process and problems in order to make an example of them to scare

00:15:21.680 everybody off. That's exactly what's happened here. And you mentioned the site. I mean, what,

00:15:26.360 what, what site are we talking about? Presumably just a whole bunch of trucks pulled up alongside

00:15:29.420 each other. Right. So basically Coots, Coots, Alberta is a village of like only a couple hundred

00:15:34.240 people. It's in the middle of the prairie. So it's just all flat for the most part. And then there's

00:15:38.880 a highway that runs through it. So the American interstate 15 ends and then Alberta highway

00:15:44.480 four begins. There's a little customs office and the guys had basically parked all their

00:15:49.520 trucks. There's photos of this all over the place, park their trucks on the Canadian side

00:15:53.000 of the border, both sides of the road. They had like campers and stuff set up in people's

00:15:57.360 property in the village of Coots. And they had assembled, there's a little bar kind of restaurant

00:16:01.940 tavern pub type place in Coots called smuggler's saloon. And that was their sort of headquarters

00:16:06.840 and everybody was just hanging around, standing around, drinking coffee, talking about all

00:16:11.640 the stuff that was going on during COVID. Like nothing was happening. So RCMP raid the

00:16:17.640 joint. They make, they arrest 13 people initially. They arrested a couple more people the next

00:16:23.420 day, including one of the Coots four guys, Jerry Morin on his way to work up in Calgary,

00:16:28.280 like five hour drive away. So they arrest all these guys and then accuse them of like just,

00:16:33.720 just, just the most heinous stuff. Conspiracy to murder police officers. They've got all these

00:16:38.740 guns. And then they had this like staged photograph of, they'd gone around to all these different

00:16:43.840 people's camper trailers and residences and vehicles. And they grabbed all these guns and

00:16:48.920 vests and ammunition and they made a big show of it, you know, to scare everybody. Um, the guys get

00:16:55.180 arrested. So, so, so, so these guys were stocking some serious firepower, were they?

00:17:02.460 I mean, well, the thing is, is that like, nobody knows who most of those guns belong to,

00:17:06.880 right? Because they are, they didn't, the RCMP were never able to attribute most of them to the

00:17:11.820 people they claim to attribute them to. Okay. I mean, just, just, just on the point of the guns,

00:17:16.620 I mean, I know in the U S it's, it's much more liberal. I don't, I don't know what the gun laws

00:17:21.600 are like in Canada, but I mean, I would imagine. Okay. You're allowed to have rifles, rifles and

00:17:27.560 shotguns are a fixture of life in rural Canada. Everybody has rifles and shotguns because you've

00:17:33.480 got bears and moose and on the prairie, you've got gophers and prairie dogs and nuisance animals,

00:17:39.680 coyotes. There's a, there's a bounty for coyotes in some places. Like if you shoot a coyote and bring

00:17:45.040 in its carcass, they'll give you money. Right. Right. And so like people, people just have guns. It's not

00:17:50.780 that big of a deal. Okay. Right. The government tried to make it a big deal, but like if you live

00:17:57.220 in rural Canada, it's not right. And it is, if you live in Calgary or Toronto, or you're like,

00:18:02.140 you know, one of these bug people, urbanite liberal party supporters, you know, you, the sight of a gun,

00:18:08.460 it just triggers you immediately. Right. Anyhow, these guys get arrested and the, the, the,

00:18:15.380 the problems start in that the, they get arrested, they get booked. Um, the nine of the 13 people are

00:18:25.000 eventually released and they focus on these four guys, Tony Olionek, Chris Carbert, Chris Lysak,

00:18:32.480 and another gentleman named Jerry Morin. They're all denied bail, right? They're put in jail. They're

00:18:38.000 accused of all these heinous crimes. Uh, three of them have no criminal records at all. Uh, Chris

00:18:43.880 Carbert had like a minor, you know, drug position thing from when he was a very young man, kind of

00:18:49.540 meaningless, but you know, all of them work upstanding citizens, you know, no criminal record, no history

00:18:55.600 of violence, nothing like there's just, they're just regular working class dudes. Tony Olionek and his

00:19:01.660 dad ran a gravel quarry, uh, well, his late father, he had a dump truck down there. Uh, Chris Lysak's

00:19:08.220 an electrician, Chris Carbert, like self-employed owns his own sort of landscaping business. And,

00:19:13.780 you know, Jerry Morin's an electrical lineman. So like, they're all just regular working class guys,

00:19:18.820 totally peaceful. Again, no criminal records. They get thrown in jail and then they get kept there.

00:19:25.800 They get denied bail. The, the, the reason for the, the, they were the, the, the bail denial

00:19:31.640 was that the charge against them is so heinous that it would, you know, uh, bring disrepute to

00:19:39.660 the justice system and the prison system. If they were let out like in the eyes of the public, that's

00:19:45.380 what the judge who denied their initial application for bail said. Right. And this is all hinging on the

00:19:52.080 fact that they believe these people were about to go on a mass cop.

00:19:55.800 killing spree or something. Correct. Right. Yes. And you know, when they got arrested,

00:20:02.060 when the RCMP showed up, everybody was like, okay, cool. Like it was totally peaceful. Nobody

00:20:07.440 put up a fight. There was never any resistance. It was just like, oh, okay. And they just went

00:20:13.340 away with it. They're like, and the next day, the, uh, whole crowd at coots dispersed. Everybody

00:20:18.460 went home peacefully. There's famous video of like the protesters singing, Oh Canada and hugging

00:20:24.080 the cops and shaking hands and all smiles. Like, okay, cool. We came, we set our pace.

00:20:28.180 We left. Right. But the government insisted that these four guys were like a threat to

00:20:34.160 the nation. They were cited by Trudeau. Uh, Trudeau's public safety minister, this guy

00:20:39.100 named Marco Mendocino was like having these fire breathing pressers. There's these armed

00:20:44.520 revolutionaries. They want to overthrow the government and they were getting ready to kill

00:20:48.540 cops. And they basically use these four guys to scare the bejesus out of the rest of the

00:20:54.020 country. Okay.

00:20:55.020 But it's palpably absurd though. Yeah. I don't know how they're going to overthrow the government

00:20:59.020 when they're in Alberta, 3000 some odd kilometers away from Ottawa, but you know.

00:21:03.560 Well, and also presumably no, no cop actually got shot during any of this.

00:21:08.120 No, there was never any violence across all of the protest sites in Canada, Ottawa, Windsor,

00:21:15.060 Manitoba, Alberta, any of the sort of smaller ones in other places, nothing, zero.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 03, 2025

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Canadian Injustice with Gord Magil

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