This is a slightly expanded version of the story that appeared in the April 2022 print edition.
Alayne McGregor
Watch out truckers! Paul Champ is filling in the “John Doe’s” in the class action lawsuit against the convoy occupation of Centretown.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Zexi Li plus Happy Goat Coffee, the Union Local 613 restaurant, and waiter Geoffrey Devaney, seeks damages for those residents and businesses most affected by the incessant honking and engine noise, air pollution, and other effects of the trucks which blocked downtown streets for more than three weeks this winter.
When initially filed by Champ’s law firm, the lawsuit was directed at the four primary organizers of the occupation, plus a series of 60 “John Doe’s” – the actual operators of the trucks. Champ told The BUZZ last week that his firm is now working to track down the identities of all the truckers to hold them responsible for what they did.
“Once we’ve completed that exercise. which we anticipate will be over the next few weeks, we will be doing another amendment to the claim to add a large number of individuals.”
These individuals have “significant assets obviously sitting in trucks, and they’re the ones that were the main perpetrators of the tortious activity that we’re suing about.” He said they weren’t going after every single car or regular truck, but rather the big semi-trailer trucks.
Behaviour that caused significant harm
The claim is targeting three types of behaviour by the truckers which caused significant harm to the residents and workers and businesses of downtown Ottawa: blocking the roads, idling 24 hours a day for weeks at a time, and the honking. It’s not addressing the on-street or in-store harassment, despite how troubling it was to residents, “primarily because we know we can’t demonstrate that that conduct was planned or organized,” he said.
Champ had little sympathy for those truckers who stayed beyond the first weekend. “They had many opportunities during the course of that protest to understand and recognize that they were causing harm to the people of downtown Ottawa. It should have been obvious that when you’re blasting those ear-splitting horns for prolonged periods from early in the morning until late at night that you’re causing serious harm to people. [As professional drivers] they get training on those air horns and those train horns, knowing how loud they are. But they did that anyway.”
They also should have noted other signals, he said: when GoFundMe shut down its the convoy campaign because it believed the conduct was illegal; when Li and Champ commenced the class action lawsuit; when they obtained the injunction against the truck noise; when the city and the province declared states of emergency.
Each of those events should have been a flag to those truckers, he said, “that what they were doing was illegal and causing harm.”
Putting convoy assets into escrow
The suit has succeeded in freezing much of the money donated to the convoy or being held by its organizers. Champ said that $1.6 million in cash and another $400,000 in bitcoin was currently being held in escrow pending the result of the case. Further amounts are currently frozen but haven’t yet been transferred to the escrow account.
Champ will be back in court in early May to extend the current freezing and preservation orders. No date has yet been set for the convoy organizers to file a defence, he said.
Finding the evidence for the class action
The class action case will take far longer than the occupation – Champ didn’t expect a decision to be made on whether it would be certified until the end of 2022.
In the meantime, his firm is finding experts on acoustics, and on respiratory illnesses (for the effect of the diesel fumes) and other medical issues. They hired a private investigator to “scoop up all the [convoy’s] online activity and save it in a way that it’s admissible to court,” and a bitcoin expert to track all the bitcoin wallets. He said there’s another $600,000 in bitcoin donations still outstanding which have to be monitored.
About $75,000 has been raised at ottawafund.ca to support the class action. Champ said they are currently finalizing an agreement with the site on how the funds will be used, and after that will be publicizing the campaign and letting people know why donations are still needed. “The out-of-pocket [expenses] are going to be fairly significant. We’ve spent almost that much already out of my own pocket.”
“It’s complex litigation – there’s a lot of parties and there are a lot of people who were harmed – we estimate around 12,000 people in downtown Ottawa. There’s a lot of money involved so it will probably take a little while.”
Champ said he wasn’t worried about the occasional continuing pro-convoy demonstrations downtown or in LeBreton Flats.
“Provided they’re not bringing in the big semi trucks and significantly disrupting the lives of downtown Ottawa residents, they’re exercising their democratic rights.”
“Provided they’re not bringing in the big semi trucks and significantly disrupting the lives of downtown Ottawa residents, they’re exercising their democratic rights. It’s when that protesting becomes directly harmful to others that that it crosses the line.”
He said that both he and Li were significantly bombarded with harassing messages and threats for a few weeks but but “that’s mostly tapered off thankfully.”
A tighter community in Centretown
“I think people from Ottawa were very tolerant of the protest even when the conduct was quite extreme, but once it became prolonged and very harmful, people started speaking out. When the police weren’t taking meaningful action, we started seeing different community actions in a peaceful and nonviolent way. But they were absolutely standing up to the truckers and the convoy protesters to let them know that the way they were protesting was not acceptable and they were harming our community.
“I think in many ways it brought the people of Ottawa closer together. Walking around downtown the week after they were gone, everyone was just looking at each other with renewed appreciation for each other and our sense of community. I think it’s made the people of downtown Ottawa a tighter community. We all shared a trauma and we’re on the same page.”