RCMP videos show how extremist ideology fuelled armed Coutts protesters
CBC
Sitting in an interview room in a southern Alberta RCMP detachment, Tony Olienick looked calm.
He stretched his legs as he casually told a police investigator what he thought should happen to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
"He needs to be tried for treason," Olienick said between bites of dinner.
"If he's proven guilty, like we know he is, hang him – and get back to how it should be."
But Trudeau wasn't the one facing trial.
That night of Feb. 14, 2022, the RCMP were interviewing Olienick and Chris Carbert, who had been arrested at an anti-pandemic restriction protest that locked down the Coutts, Alta., border crossing for two weeks.
Police would accuse them of conspiring to murder police officers. That charge would not hold up at trial. Instead, they were convicted of possessing firearms dangerous to the public peace, with a judge saying they were prepared for a firefight with police.
Police evidence obtained by The Fifth Estate shows their actions were fuelled by extremist beliefs — including the belief that they would have to defend their fellow protesters against an invading, tyrannical authority. That has raised new concerns about the danger conspiracy theories might pose for Canada in the future.
"I honestly think that there are bad things happening with elites right now," Carbert said.
"They're pretty open about it, right? They get the World Economic Forum," he said, referencing an international body frequently the focus of conspiracy theories.
The Fifth Estate reviewed more than 10 hours of video showing police interrogations of Olienick and Carbert in which the two men detailed how they saw the pandemic as a sign of an inevitable collapse of society.
Kurt Phillips, a board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, reviewed the videos for The Fifth Estate and said they showed the men held an extreme world view in which they believed their lives and way of life were under threat from not only the Canadian government but also a global network of powerful agents.
"If you have people who are already kind of geared up for some sort of violent confrontation, it's hard to talk that down," Phillips said.
"They genuinely probably thought they were going to be written about as heroes in history books, that they would go down as people who helped save the country from tyranny."
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