Ottawa Police Distributed Memo Falsely Claiming Foreign Extremists Funded Freedom Convoy

Families join the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa after police distributed arrest notices to truckers and their supporters occupying Wellington St. and the Parliament Hill area on Feb. 16, 2022. (Richard Moore/The Epoch Times)

The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) sent around a memo that claimed the Freedom Convoy was funded by foreign extremists just one week before the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14.

“Funding appears to be coming from a host of U.S. and international sources,” read the memo titled “Examining U.S. Support and Funding for the Canadian Trucker Convoy,” emailed to then-OPS chief Peter Sloly on Feb. 7 and obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

The report was prepared for Sloly by a UK think tank called Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

The Institute claimed the Freedom Convoy “received support from right wing politicians, organizing groups, and content creators in the United States,” such as Former President Donald Trump, political commentator Ben Shapiro, and politician Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“The convoy is attracting violent and harmful content and commentary from TikTok users particularly in posts that target Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,” the memo said.

A CSIS briefing transcript from February, introduced as evidence to the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) on Oct. 18, showed that the Canadian spy agency found no evidence of foreign influence on the Freedom Convoy protest.

“There [are] no foreign actors identified at this point supporting or financing this convoy,” said CSIS Director David Vigneault in his briefing during a Feb. 6 teleconference.

“CSIS has also not seen any foreign money coming from [other] states to support this.”

Supt. Pat Morris, head of the Ontario Provincial Police’s (OPP) Operations Intelligence Bureau, also recently told the POEC that he thought claims of Russian or American influence on the Freedom Convoy to be “problematic.”

Morris told OPP Deputy Commissioner Charles Cox in an email sent on Feb. 22 that “public discourse” surrounding the Freedom Convoy “is providing a very different picture than what law enforcement collectively gathered.”

In his testimony before the commission on Oct. 19, Morris said, “I saw that information, those assertions, foreign influence, money, etc., being played out by a number of people and talked about. And I would challenge that.”

“My point in this email was to make this point, which I believe is an ethical and moral point, and a point premised in law.”

‘88 Percent’

ISD also wrote in its memo that Trump “mentioned the convoy in an email to supporters.”

“The Trump sons also joined in with Donald Trump, Jr. by praising the convoy on Facebook,” said the memo. “Meanwhile Eric Trump claimed media were deliberately not covering the convoy and described media as the ‘enemy of the people.'”

Juan Benitez, president of the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, told the House of Commons finance committee on March 17 that 88 percent of donations made to the Freedom Convoy “originated in Canada” and 86 percent of donors were from Canada.

“When you looked at the foreign contributions and the less than 20 percent of foreign donors—or whatever number, maybe 22 percent—were there any large donors that would have stuck out and would have raised red flags in trying to influence the outcome of this protest?” asked Conservative MP Ed Fast.

“No, we did not discover that,” Benitez replied. “Once we reviewed the donations, we did not identify significant donations or patterns that were there.”

GoFundMe removed the Freedom Convoy’s crowdfunding account on Feb. 4 for “violating” its service terms. While active, the Freedom Convoy account raised over $10 million.

GoFundMe’s General Counsel Kim Wilford told the finance committee in March that the largest Freedom Convoy donation through the platform was “from a Canadian.”

“It was in the amount of $30,000,” she said.

Liberal MP Sophie Chantal asked Benitez during the committee meeting about the “source of the donations.”

“I say this because we know that Russia and all other money launderers hold bank accounts in every country under several shell companies,” Chantal said.

Benitez replied saying “there was virtually no, perhaps a handful at most, of donations from Russia.”

“In our opinion, and from the evidence that we see, there was no coordinated effort there to have any kind of contribution or impact.”

Noé Chartier, Omid Ghoreishi, and David Wagner contributed to this report.