In an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Evan Solomon, Conservative interim leader Candice Bergen challenged the legacy media’s claims about the Freedom Convoy.
Over the weekend, Bergen called assertions that the Freedom Convoy was intending to overthrow the government misinformation and a distraction from the Trudeau government’s demonization of unvaccinated Canadians.
“We very much support Canadians who were and still are against the mandatory vaccines. We don’t believe that they should be wedged, called names, stigmatized. We don’t think they should be set aside. Our job is to listen to Canadians. We don’t always have to agree with what they’re talking about. We don’t agree with everything that they want to do,” said Bergen.
“The people who protested here in Ottawa were there as you know hundreds and thousands of them. They were upset, they wanted to be heard and we as Conservatives believe that they deserve to be heard and we wanted the prime minister to listen.”
During the interview, Bergen also reiterated her call for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s resignation after misleading Canadians by claiming that law enforcement requested that the Liberals invoke the Emergencies Act to quash the peaceful demonstrators.
“He used it as his argument more times than I think we can even recall,” said Bergen. “This was one of their main arguments: police were asking for it. We now found out that is not true. That’s not the only area where he misled. He said that foreign funding funded the protest. That wasn’t true. They made accusations against the protesters that they set fires in apartment building in Ottawa. That was not true.”
Several key claims made by the Liberal government to justify their use of unprecedented emergency powers have since been debunked in official testimonies.
In a recent memo by Public Safety Canada, the department’s own director-general of its central operation centre for the convoy stated that there was no violence and convoy organizers were being respectful.
“No violence took place in the National Capital Region despite national protest for a wide variety of causes,” the memo stated. “Overall assessment: The majority of the event was peaceful. Since most government employees are working remotely, the disruption to government activities is so far minor.”
