Canadian Armed Forces Veteran James Topp and his Canada Marches team met with Conservatives MPs in Ottawa on Wednesday, where he urged the federal government to work with him to heal the divide created by their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.."The number of folks that I have met from Vancouver to Ontario, who have come forward to say 'thank you for what you're doing. This is important,' this number is in the thousands," Topp said. "The number that have said 'please stop speaking on my behalf' is zero.".Topp, a 22-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces and current reservist, has been marching on foot from B.C. to Ontario for the last two months in protest of vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions. He was charged in May with two conduct infractions for speaking out about mandates while in uniform..Topp was joined at the Valour Building in downtown Ottawa by Tom Marazzo, a founding member with Veterans4Freedom, Dr. Paul Alexander, a former Trump administration official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Daniel Bulford, a former RCMP member and Freedom Convoy organizer..The MPs that met with Topp included Melissa Lantsman, Jeremy Patzer, Arnold Viersen, Dean Allison, Leslyn Lewis, Alex Ruff, Martin Shields, and Warren Steinley. Several MPs got up and left the room while Topp and Marazzo were speaking..Topp said one of the things that stood out to him on his journey was the number of Canadians who are not so much concerned with vaccine mandates, but with the federal government.."They see it as intractable, inflexible, and unresponsive to their needs," he said..Topp said he has witnessed a divide in Canada that he has "never seen or experienced before," except for in war zones. "So I would like for us to repair the divide that has been created by COVID mandates and by the overbearing nature of some of these policies.".Topp also announced he will be launching the group Canadian Citizens Coalition, which will be made of independent journalists, educators and small businesses to "push down on the lever and provide some balance." .On June 30, Topp will wrap up his march by visiting the Ottawa War Memorial. He assured MPs that, "this is not a protest and I am not occupying the city."."I will put my hand on the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier, and I'll be able to look at myself, and look at my team, and know in my heart that there were a group of Canadians who came here under the common belief of what veterans did; that they sacrificed for the democratic principles that this society was built on.".Dr. Alexander spoke at length about the harms the federal government's COVID policies caused Canadians, including lockdowns, masking, "flawed" PCR tests, and vaccines..Alexander said Canada should have followed the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that was signed and published by public health experts in October 2020, which called for protecting the vulnerable while letting the remainder carry on as normal..The COVID-19 vaccines should have also never been approved, according to Alexander, as they were based on the original Wuhan strain from China and "do not work." He also expressed concern with vaccinating children, which he claimed would "damage their innate immune system," and make them more susceptible to other diseases..None of the Conservative MPs had any questions for Topp's team. But Conservative MP Patzer said there had been "one political party that has stood up in the House of Commons, before the last federal election, and spoke on the position that you guys are here with today.".Patzer said Topp and his team "had support all along," and acknowledged that it must have taken a lot of work to get their message out..Marazzo, who was also a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa, told the MPs Canada is "a mess" and needs to be repaired..“James has been to a civil war. I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen here, but there’s a lot of similarities here to pre-civil wars around the globe, if you look at your history,” Marazzo said..“We don’t want that here. We’re going down a very dark path in this country, and we need help.”
