Only in Canada: Ottawa Police blocks Rebel News investigation into ‘jackboots’ convoy messages
Members of the RCMP musical ride team in Ottawa to assist local Ottawa police with their Freedom Convoy crackdown joked in a WhatsApp group chat that it was time for peaceful anti-mandate protesters to ‘hear our jackboots on the ground.’
Rebel News filed for access to information with the Ottawa police for their communications relating to the comments made by the RCMP musical ride team, and the force has denied the release records.
While Ottawa police claim they have no communications regarding the musical ride fiasco, the leaked messages made international news and became a topic of discussion on Fox News for days.
A second excuse, that the Ottawa police does not collect the text messages of members personal phones, records from member’s work phones were also not provided to Rebel News.
The Freedom Convoy was a nationwide protest movement that saw thousands of trucks and initially hundreds of thousands of demonstrators land in the nation’s capital for nearly four weeks protesting remaining COVID restrictions including cross-border vaccine mandates for truckers.
In previously leaked screenshots of the WhatsApp chat, officers can be seen joking about mistreating the protesters and bragging about their hotels and overtime hours.
“Don’t kick them all out until next week’s group gets our turn” wrote member Andrew Nixon along with a picture of his beer. Another member, Robin Thibault remarked about the accommodations in Ottawa, “Nice Downtown in Chateau Laurier”.
Nixon mocked the protesters, chatting that it was “time for the protesters to hear out jackboots on the ground” and when he was admonished by another member of the chat wrote, “okay we can give out free hugs and unicorn stickers.”
A member named Marca laughed off the trampling off a protester on a mobility scooter by a Toronto mounted police unit also in Ottawa to assist.
