Harold Jonker

Harold Jonker

In early 2022, freedom fighters around the world thrilled at the footage emanating from the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, deriving inspiration from truckers’ creative pushback against Covid restrictions and mandates and from the groundswell of support displayed by Canadians from all walks of life.

Harold Jonker, owner of Jonker Trucking Company, joined the Freedom Convoy as a “route captain” for the Niagara region, remaining in Ottawa for three weeks without incident. During that time, he gave numerous interviews to Old Media entities such as Fox News and the BBC as well as speaking with various New Media voices. After a peculiar delay of 15 months, local police informed Jonker in May 2023 that criminal charges (including charges of incitement to “mischief” and “intimidation”) had been filed against him for his Freedom Convoy involvement.

Happily, Justice Kevin B. Phillips of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has just acquitted Jonker of all charges, arguing that the Crown failed to prove its case. Christopher Fleury of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) represented Jonker and noted that the Crown largely relied on Jonker’s media interviews as evidence. However,

“Justice Phillips found that Mr. Jonker was treated by interviewers like a ‘foreign correspondent’—someone describing events as he witnessed them. While supportive of the protest, Mr. Jonker’s words were expressions of opinion, not incitement to unlawful action.”

Jonker Trucking, which began as a family business in 1993 and incorporated in 1998, transports goods throughout Canada and the U.S. and describes itself as putting “a lot of emphasis on running a company that is strong on family values.” After the convoy, the Ontario government sanctioned the company for a week and froze its bank accounts.

At the time of the Freedom Convoy, Jonker was a part-time town councilman for the Township of West Lincoln, which chose to financially punish Jonker by docking him one month’s pay, falsely alleging that he had breached the Township’s Code of Conduct. Unfortunately, a JCCF lawsuit seeking to strike down that decision was unsuccessful, and Jonker still has reimbursement of a to-be-determined amount of Township legal expenses “hanging over his head.”

Jonker speculates that the Crown is targeting people in a position to influence public opinion, with the implicit message being, “You are going to pay the price if you dare stand up for the truth or dare to stand up for those who can’t.” This punitive attitude—and the Crown’s willingness to “devote a lot of resources to these cases,” according to attorney Fleury—has unfortunately achieved guilty verdicts against Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, both found guilty of “mischief” in early April. Jonker expresses mixed feelings about his own acquittal “because so many others who are facing what I faced were found guilty or are still in court.”

When the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the country’s history, which not only unleashed unspeakable acts of police brutality but green-lighted the freezing of hundreds of bank accounts (with Canadian banks shielded from any legal liability for the consequences), it taught freedom fighters some chilling lessons about the importance of financial transaction freedom—lessons that we still would do well to remember.

But we should also celebrate the quiet heroism of people like Harold Jonker. As he reminds us, “Three years ago it was truck drivers that gave the world hope.”

Note: Solari Report subscribers who would like to refamiliarize themselves with Freedom-Convoy-related events can visit our News Trends & Stories Headlines Aggregator; select calendar year 2022 and do a search for “truckers.”