Through his social media influence and his many videos, Pat King rose to become one of the most prominent figures in protests that paralyzed Canada’s capital for over a month, contesting coronavirus restrictions.
Now, more than two years later, an Ottawa judge on Friday found Mr. King guilty of five charges involving mischief and disobeying a court order.
Mr. King’s case is among several high-profile trials of protesters accused of organizing the protests and urging others to participate.
In September, two men were sentenced to just over six years in prison for public mischief and firearm possession for their roles in a protest in Coutts, Alberta, a border town where the police recovered a cache of weapons.
Verdicts are still pending in the trials of two other protest organizers, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, for their roles in the Ottawa demonstrations.
Mischief, which in Canada’s criminal code generally refers to damage to property or disruption, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Mr. King’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. King, who lives in Red Deer, Alberta, and had described himself as an investigative journalist, recorded and streamed his arrest in February 2022, and remained in jail for about five months after a judge was persuaded that he was a risk of continuing his protest activities.
He was eventually released in July 2022, but about a year later was taken back into custody briefly for violating his bail conditions by posting on social media.
The protests gridlocked downtown Ottawa for about four weeks and inspired demonstrations in other major cities, including Toronto, and standoffs at border crossings in Windsor, Ontario and Emerson, Manitoba, that disrupted the flow of trade between the United States and Canada.
They were called the “freedom convoy” by some organizers because many of the protesters and their leaders were truckers initially angered over vaccination mandates for cross-border travel at the height of the pandemic.
While social media played a central role as a tool for organizing the demonstrations and attracting participants, Mr. King’s lawyers argued that he was not a key figure, but went to Ottawa as a lone citizen to protest peacefully and exercise his right to free expression.
Much of the prosecution’s case against Mr. King was based on more than 30 videos from his social media feeds.
In one, he said he found it “hilarious” that nearby residents were unable to sleep because protesters kept honking vehicle horns.
In others he can be seen signing autographs and posing for photos with other protesters near Canada’s Parliament. “You are the reason why we’re here,” a supporter tells him on camera in one video, according to the CBC. “We drove five hours yesterday to get here.”
Mr. King, in one social media post, urged people to gather in Ottawa and to “honk those horns, let the heavens hear you.”
During the trial, prosecutors said that Mr. King was responsible for persuading 60 to 70 protesters — most of them driving pickup trucks outfitted with large Canadian flags — to effectively cut off Ottawa’s airport by driving slowly along its access roads.
While vaccine mandates helped spark the demonstrations, the ire of protesters shifted from general fatigue over Canada’s restrictive public health orders to blanket resentment against the policies of the ruling Liberal Party and its leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
He became yet more unpopular after invoking the Emergencies Act, a rarely used legal tool that the government argued was needed to clear about 400 trucks from the area surrounding Parliament Hill. The truckers had been honking their horns and blocking the area to get the attention of lawmakers.
The emergency order enabled the authorities to restrict travel, ban gatherings and temporarily freezing hundreds of protesters’ bank accounts.
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