RCMP videos show how extremist ideology fuelled armed Coutts protesters

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.

• Watch the full documentary, “Conspiracy in Coutts,” from The Fifth Estate on YouTube or CBC-TV Friday at 9 p.m. ET. It will also stream on CBC Gem.

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.”

Phillps has researched extremism in Alberta for about 25 years. He said he recognized some of the conspiracy theories espoused by the men from years past.

“They might change the boogeyman such as it is, but ultimately the same groups and same people are kind of feared and demonized,” Phillips said.

“The main focus is on distrust and fear of the government, ultimately that there will be some sort of civil conflict.”

Phillips said those arrested and some of their supporters “seem to look at the events at Coutts as kind of a precursor to that civil war.

Interviews reveal ‘rabbit hole,’ fears

The interviews show the effort RCMP made to get the two men to open up to explain a trove of firearms pulled from an RV in Coutts where the men stayed during the protest.

Quickly, the RCMP uncovered the extremist ideology driving the men’s actions.

“I’m probably too deep down the rabbit hole, but it scares me … from seeing all these elites doing what they’re doing and stuff,” Carbert said. “I think they’re evil, I just do.”

At one point, an investigator asks Carbert about his biggest fear.

‘We are going to be slaves … this is how my brain works.”

Carbert had parked a trailer in the village of Coutts, where he and Olienick stayed during the protest. RCMP raided the trailer the night they arrested the men, and seized several firearms from the trailer and a nearby home.

When police asked him about those firearms, Carbert said they “could be useful for anything.”

“Let’s say me and my son head to … the mountains,” he said. “People are trying to come and get us. What if we have some for that, right?”

In the interview, Olienick would deny he was planning an attack, but described getting ready to go on the defensive.

“But defence of what?” the investigator asked.

“Defence against tyranny, against the government,” Olienick replied.

At one point, he said he believed the RCMP would eventually join protesters in the fight.

“The government then will pull the Insurrection Act,” Olienick told the investigator.

He appeared to misname the Emergencies Act, legislation the federal government invoked in part based on the allegations at Coutts to forcibly disband cross-Canada protests against COVID-19 mandates.

“So then what happens is the [United Nations] comes, which is Chinese troops,” Olienick said. “And there is an imminent invasion of Chinese troops on Canadian and American soil.”

He also said they would protect protesters, “if you guys pulled the trigger first or if the government sends goons … like Chinese troops.”

Phillips said when he first started tracking extremism, these types of false conspiracy theories were “niche.”

“The problem that we have now is we live in a social media world where all of this is at the fingertips of the person,” he said.

RCMP search uncovered ‘collapse of the system’ preparation

As the interviews were underway, the RCMP worked to secure court permission to raid Olienick’s rural property, outside Claresholm, south of Calgary.

Through the interviews, it emerged that Olienick and Carbert had been spending time together in the months leading up to the protest.

“We got to build a community because we don’t know the outcome of what’s going to happen with the collapse of the system in the society,” Olienick told the RCMP. “So obviously we need to look after each other.”

The RCMP got a behind-the-scenes look into Olienick’s way of thinking and his preparation when they found his journal on a desk. It contained handwritten entries dating back to the start of the pandemic.

In March 2020, as the world shut down in the face of the emerging COVID-19 threat, Olienick wrote: “End of capitalism.”

By May 2021, he wrote of the government promoting vaccines: “Hope all the sheep get swept away in God’s wrath when the time comes.”

That summer, the journal included multiple short entries mentioning he was working on a bunker.

By December 2021, about a month before he’d go to Coutts, he wrote a long entry about the rapture, and a 1,000-day war against Satan or the Antichrist.

“God will see my efforts and sacrifice and grant me into heaven,” Olienick writes.

When the convoy set out for Coutts, on Jan. 28, 2022, with people joining from communities across Alberta, he wrote: “1776!!”

Phillips said this was a reference to the American Revolution and “the idea that the United States was basically born in blood, born out of a revolution, and that this would be … maybe a precursor to our 1776.”

At Olienick’s property, the RCMP uncovered a trove of supplies, including stockpiles of food, tactical gear and gas masks.

They found firearms strewn across his property, including a loaded .22 Browning rifle in a bedroom and, in a truck, a .22 Ruger rifle and a 12-gauge Maverick shotgun.

• PHOTO GALLERY | The Fifth Estate accessed RCMP crime scene photos from Olienick’s property:

Across his property, RCMP found more than 36,000 rounds of ammunition — an amount criminologist and gun enthusiast Kelly Sundberg called “astronomical.”

“To stockpile that much ammunition, that’s highly concerning,” Sundberg said.

In a wooden box, RCMP also found two pipe bombs — which would eventually earn Olienick a conviction for illegal possession of explosives.

Experts warn of risk of conspiracy-driven crime

The Fifth Estate asked three police and extremism specialists to follow this case over the past two years and to review evidence released by the court.

All argued authorities weren’t fully equipped to understand the implications of the conspiracy theories espoused by the men and warned that extremist ideologies based on conspiracies should be taken more seriously.

“I don’t think this case solidifies anything by any stretch, but it sure does show us that any future case is going to be incredibly difficult,” said Sundberg, a former law enforcement officer who teaches justice studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“There needs to be more preparation because this isn’t going to be the last time.”

University of Alberta criminologist Temitope Oriola has followed the rise of support for Carbert and Olienick, and noted how supporters claim the men are not only innocent, but also were set up for political purposes.

“There was this intrinsic belief that it cannot be that dangerous, they cannot pose much of a threat because they are us,” Oriola said. “They are a mirror image of mainstream society.”

Oriola researches terrorism and said he believes that hesitancy to see the men as ideologically driven and organized may have hampered police efforts to investigate.

“This was treated as a standard series of street-level crime,” Oriola said. “I think in part because of that, they’ve gotten away fairly lightly.”

Phillips said he agreed it seemed that police were treating this as a “normal crime,” and didn’t dig deeply enough to understand the impact such ideologies can have.

“People’s view is that people have the right to believe these conspiracies, and sure, you do,” Phillips said.

“The danger is acting on those beliefs, and I think at Coutts, we saw some individuals that were willing to act on those beliefs.”

The RCMP and Public Safety Canada declined interview requests.

‘Fanciful’ claim of self-defence: judge

The men’s trial concluded in Lethbridge Court of King’s Bench in August, with the jury rejecting the conspiracy to murder charge, and instead finding them guilty of possessing firearms for a dangerous purpose.

Justice David Labrenz sentenced each man to 6½ years in prison.

In his sentencing report, Labrenz said he found Olienick and Carbert had been politically motivated and were prepared for a “firefight” with police.

Labrenz said he believed they would have engaged police “should either offender have deemed it necessary to do so, because of the self-justifying pronouncement of … a nebulous but fanciful claim of self-defence against the police.”

Both the Crown and defence are appealing that verdict.

Carbert, Olienick ‘true believers’: researcher

After reviewing the case, Phillips said he believes Carbert and Olienick are “true believers.”

“These are people who no amount of time in jail is going to change that,” he said. “They can’t think of themselves as being criminals and neither can their supporters.

“The community that was developed as a result of this: they’re still agitated, they’re still angry, they’re still looking for change.”

Outside the sentencing hearing in Lethbridge, some supporters told CBC they considered Olienick and Carbert to be heroes, despite the court findings about their actions.

One supporter, Alex Van Herk, said he is increasingly worried about what the government will do in the future in the face of their opposition.

“They know that more and more Canadians in the world are waking up to what they were doing and what their intent was,” he said. “I believe, truly, that if they keep pushing, the rising will come again.”

‘Scary future,” researcher warns

The Fifth Estate has tried repeatedly to secure interviews with Olienick and Carbert since their arrest and subsequent conviction, but through their lawyers, they declined.

On Monday, Carbert called The Fifth Estate from prison to claim his conviction was part of an elaborate setup by authorities.

“If I were you, I would hold off on this because there’s going to be a lot of stuff coming out,” he said. “This is basically a coverup for the Emergencies Act.”

Both a public inquiry and a Federal Court ruling have stated that while the events in Coutts did play a role in the government invoking the Emergencies Act, it was one of many factors that led to that decision.

The Fifth Estate asked Carbert to explain what he was doing at Coutts with firearms, but he ended the call without answering.

As a former law enforcement officer and now criminologist, Sundberg believes the police acted appropriately when they seized firearms and arrested the men.

This case, he said, was a lesson for Canadian law enforcement and security agencies, and foreshadows a “kind of a scary future” for Canada.

“I think that those cops are doing the best job they could at the time, and that their focus was on putting a quick end to it,” Sundberg said.

“If we don’t get a handle on online self-radicalization and extremism, people’s lives are at risk.”