Tamara Lich, the grandmother from Medicine Hat, Alberta, who became the face of the Freedom Convoy protest, has written an autobiographical book about her journey.
“I had spent 49 days in prison and I hadn’t even been convicted of a crime. There are violent offenders in this country who have served less time than I have,” she writes in her new book.
None of the charges against Lich have been proven in court. A two-week trial is scheduled to commence on Sept. 5. She is represented by prominent Ottawa criminal defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon.
Her Story
In an interview with The Epoch Times on April 26, Lich said she wants Canadians to know she is “doing great,” and her book “is a way to let people know that I’m doing fine. We’re still in an in-it-to-win-it kind of thing.”Lich said while in prison, as she was praying, she knew that “God obviously has a purpose for me, and my work is not done yet.”
“I miss seeing pictures and stuff, sharing my life, pictures of my grand kids. It sucks,” she said.
She is also not allowed to talk to a number of individuals associated with the convoy protest.
The conditions mean she cannot promote her book, but she is able to go on a book-signing tour and meet Canadians across the country if she is careful what she says.
She said as a 50-year-old woman, it’s “kind of ridiculous” that her younger sister, as court-ordered surety, has to check her phone.
“She has to go through all my devices and make sure I don’t have social media, that I’m not talking to anyone on my no-contact order,” Lich said, likening it to having a “babysitter.”
Ontario Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman asked the prosecutor to cite one case where a mischief case had resulted in a 10-year prison term. He released Lich on bail after 15 minutes of deliberation.
Goodman noted that Lich was not charged with “sedition or inciting a riot,” and it was “highly unlikely that this [then] 49-year old accused, with no prior criminal record and questions regarding her direct participation in the overall protests and gridlock of the city would face a potential lengthy term of imprisonment.”
“Take those shackles off,” he ordered the court bailiff.
The book includes a chapter on Lich’s background, education, employment, and family. “Just to give people an idea of where I grew up, how I grew up,” she says.
The bulk of the book is the convoy journey to Ottawa and the three-week protest in the capital city, and concludes with details of Lich’s arrests and time in jail.
She kept a diary while in prison in Ottawa. It recounts her first arrest, when two female police officers stood outside in the frigid winter night and searched her in the parking lot.
“They took off my coat and emptied all my pockets. They did a full search right out there in the dark and freezing cold... they put me into a tiny little cell with a metal toilet, a metal sink and a cement slab for a bed. It had been snowing and wet all day. My boots were wet. My sweater was wet,” she wrote.
“I asked for a blanket. They said they didn’t have one. I was freezing. I was exhausted. The concrete was sucking what little warmth I had out of my body. So I just waited there.”
Media
Lich has harsh words for the media, which she accuses of “spreading a lot of misinformation and disinformation.” She said she has no plans to give certain outlets interviews about her book, even if they suddenly decided to be fair and finally hear her side of the story.“They will celebrate visible minorities who stand for a government-approved left-wing cause. You'll be treated a lot different if you’re a Métis grandma with the wrong politics,” she said.
The first thing the media did, she says, was to attack her heritage claims and try to prove she wasn’t aboriginal.
“My grandmother was a Cree. My grandfather was a Cree. My birth mother, who came from a family of 13 children, put me up for adoption in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I was adopted at two months old,” she explains in her book.
Her adoptive parents were Irish and Norwegian, and she was born and raised in Saskatchewan. Lich met her biological mother for the first time when she was in her late teens, and she had to search out her indigenous heritage.
“After I was arrested, I presented to the court my membership card from the Alberta Métis Nation,” she said.
Loss
During the pandemic, Lich said she “lost every single avenue of income,” as did her husband, Dwayne. The couple worked in the oil and gas industry, which she says was devastated by the shutdowns. They played music in a band, but all the venues that hired live music were shut down. Lich also worked part-time as a fitness coach, but the gyms were closed.Lich says she didn’t mind wearing a mask if it made other people more comfortable, or if she had to in order to access basic services. She said in a small community in Manitoba, where she and her husband went during COVID to be with her daughter, who was expecting a baby and running a farm, the community was “very militant with their mask mandates.”
“Living in in a really small community like that, if you didn’t put a mask on, you didn’t get groceries,” Lich said. “Staying home and sitting on the couch watching TV and eating potato chips used to be something that we frowned on. Suddenly it was recast as selfless and noble.”
She said one of the stories that impacted her greatly was a mother with a 12-year-old who had muscular dystrophy. “He wasn’t allowed to go to the pool for his swimming therapy because he’s not vaccinated, so his mobility was getting rapidly worse.”
Another mother, with an autistic daughter, told Lich one of the few things that brought her daughter joy was going to the movies. “She wasn’t allowed to do that, and the daughter couldn’t understand why.”
Lich said she heard from people who were forbidden from “visiting their sick and dying parents locked up in long-term care facilities. People whose loved ones died afraid and alone. They lost their jobs, their cars, their homes. Their brother, or husband had killed himself.”
“It was just heart-wrenching ... so much suffering that didn’t need to happen,” she said.
The Protest
“Hold the Line” describes the relationships in Ottawa, good and bad. Ultimately, two crowd-funding efforts would raise more than $10 million each. “The money started pouring in,” said Lich. “Our Facebook page was inundated with messages from all across the country. People wanting to know how they could join us, or how they could help, or just to thank us for what we’re doing.”She talks about the dozens of organizers involved the protest, some with their own political viewpoints, and how some relationships changed over the course of the protests.
Lich said the protest was about more than just fighting against vaccine mandates—it was about reuniting people and a country that had been torn apart. “This was about humanity.”
“We had just been through two years of politicians and health officials and the police and the media trying to divide us all,” Lich writes.
“They encouraged us to be suspicious of one another, with snitch lines, and taught us to call each other murderers, and to scapegoat each other. They had tried to turn Canada into an ugly, angry, unforgiving and untrusting nation. They hadn’t just dehumanized the unvaccinated. They had dehumanized us all.”
