She cross-examined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Public Order Emergency Commission.
She represented former premier Brian Peckford in a lawsuit challenging the government’s restrictions on mobility rights for over 5 million unvaccinated Canadians.
She filed a lawsuit on behalf of Lethbridge mom-of-three Carrie Sakamoto, who was severely injured by the COVID vaccine.
And just last week, she launched a proposed class action lawsuit against the Alberta government over pandemic business restrictions.
Despite her high-profile legal work, lawyer Eva Chipiuk has never been interviewed about these cases by the legacy media.
“We hear these ministers talking about Canadian content. That’s why it’s so important for them to be providing subsidies to the CBC and mainstream media, because they have to uphold Canadian content. And here I am, like, it’s all Canadian content, everything I’m doing,” Chipiuk, 44, tells True North.
“This is information that Canadians should understand – what actions are before the courts in Canada… these are nationally significant issues, and not a word.”
Born to a mother who fled communist Poland and a Ukrainian father working as a farmer in Alberta, Chipiuk recalls her family convincing her to become a doctor.
But in her youth, Chipiuk had to accompany her mother to traffic court to act as her translator. She was disillusioned by the experience, remembering it as “dismissive” and “unpleasant.” It was ultimately a catalyst in her applying for law school.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to go through that again, I want to be able to understand why somebody can charge me,’” she says. “I just wanted to understand it better. I never had big hopes of being some big criminal lawyer or anything like that. I just felt it’s important for people to know the justice system and the legal system.”
Chipiuk is a lawyer-turned-yoga teacher-turned-lawyer again. About five years into her legal career where she focused on property rights, Chipiuk, then in her early thirties, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She knew she needed a break. She started practicing yoga and left her job to teach the discipline abroad.
“Four years of traveling the world. Literally. But I came back and my same old office took me back. I went to the same desk and some of the same files four years later. That’s law for you. It’s so slow,” Chipiuk recounts.
“And then after that, my yoga studio closed here in Edmonton… so I had the bright idea of opening up my own yoga studio and I said, well, if I’m going to open up the yoga studio, we need a healthy food cafe as well. So I just did it all.”
She opened a hot yoga studio, Studio X Bikram Yoga, and a Green Moustache Co. health food franchise in 2018.
Enter 2020, the COVID era.
With the government’s on-and-off lockdowns shutting down her studio, Chipiuk had to walk away from business ownership in January 2021.
“They kept shutting it down for months at a time without notice. I still had to pay my full crazy leasing bills and stuff. So I made a really tough decision just to walk away. It was like two children I had to just walk away from.”
She took a job with the City of Edmonton expropriating land for the highway and light rail transit system.
“I started working at home at my kitchen table. And even though I was to remain at my kitchen table, they wanted to enforce vaccine mandates. And I’m like, ‘this is kind of silly,’” she says. “I was seeing what was going on. And I was surprised that more lawyers weren’t doing anything.”
Chipiuk saw that employer vaccine mandates were imminent, so she quit her job with the city in October 2021 and joined the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.
“I was really keen to get involved in this legal battle, because I knew, it’s gonna be big, and it’s coming.”
It was with the Justice Centre that Chipiuk worked on the Peckford file, defending the mobility rights of unvaccinated Canadians who were barred from travelling by air or rail between 2021-2022.
“Not too many people generally challenge the government and that’s kind of what I was doing in my earlier career, is protecting or helping represent individuals or groups with their property rights. And then this all has been, with COVID, about personal rights. And so it was kind of a natural transition.”
Lawyer Keith Wilson, Chipiuk’s friend for over a decade, worked with her representing Tamara Lich and the Freedom Convoy organizers in Ottawa in early 2022, where they dealt with a class action lawsuit, injunctions, bank freezes, donation issues, and criminal charges.
“Eva and I were on the ground. And different lawyers came and went. The other lawyers found it too intense; asked to be relieved. But Eva never flinched,” Wilson tells True North.
“It’s absolutely clear that the media has made a conscious effort not to cover any of the cases that Eva has been involved in.”
Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich notes the legacy media is “always promoting minorities: women this, women that. And there is a woman – there is a professional, intelligent woman – who cross-examined the prime minister, and no one’s talking about it.”
“Legacy media just seem to have one narrative that they side with. And that’s it,” Lich tells True North.
Wilson notes Chipiuk’s representation of Carrie Sakamoto, a 47-year-old Alberta mom who was hospitalized for over two weeks and had to undergo physical rehabilitation after being injured by the Pfizer vaccine.
“They don’t want to cover that,” he says of the legacy media. “They don’t want people to know about that. It goes against the narrative. And then it has the second layer that it goes against the government, it’s not in the federal Liberal government’s interest to have a story like that out. So they suppress that.”
Part of the reason the vaccine-injured woman wanted to sue the government was to raise awareness about her story amongst a mainstream audience, but no legacy media picked it up.
Legacy media journalists “have failed the Canadian people,” Chipiuk says.
“The financial hit that you take, when you stand up and do these types of cases, is a figure that you would never believe. It’s so huge. And you lose clients over it,” Wilson says, adding that both he and Chipiuk have been subject to politically motivated law society complaints, lawsuits, and hours upon hours of work without pay.
Chipiuk also runs an initiative called Empowered Canadians that aims to educate citizens about the political and legal system in Canada so they can become more involved in civic life.
I ask Chipiuk, who describes herself as politically closest to being a libertarian, if she was considering a run for office.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it,” she says coyly.
“Municipal? Provincial? Federal?” I prod.
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”
