A Few Words about the MOU Mentioned during Chris Barber's Evidence

And why it was "legal nonsense"

Ordinarily, I have been watching only end-of-day summaries of the evidence being heard at the Emergencies Act Inquiry. Rebel Media’s Sheila Gunn Reid and True North’s Andrew Lawton are both doing a great job with that. But today I spent a bit of time listening to the evidence of convoy organizer Chris Barber. 

I heard a couple of references to a document that was being widely circulated last January and February by a group called Canada Unity. They called it an MOU—an acronym for “Memorandum of Understanding”. I located a copy of it on my computer, first downloaded on February 1, 2022. Copies of the full thing are still floating around on the internet; for example, here.

I remember being very surprised to hear that there was a Memorandum of Understanding being circulated, because I had not heard from any news source that an understanding had been reached. I remember looking at it briefly and thinking, “Gee, someone really doesn’t know what they’re doing,” then putting it aside and refusing to sign, no matter how many times I was urged to do so. I wonder how many people were actually persuaded to sign this thing. 

Extract from the Famous “MOU”

As far as I’m concerned, a Memorandum of Understanding is a document that people sometimes prepare when they’ve just completed difficult or complicated negotiations with an opposing party, and have finally hammered out a skeletal deal, but have not yet had time to get their lawyers to put it into final form with the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

For example, an MOU might be used when a buyer and seller are negotiating the terms of a business acquisition. Or an MOU might be written out—sometimes by hand—in the courthouse  corridor when litigants agree to settle their dispute instead of taking the risk of going to trial.  

However, the overriding characteristic of an MOU is that it always reflects an understanding that has been reached by both sides. 

The strange document circulated last winter should really have been entitled “Canada Unity’s Wish List” because that’s all it ever was. It was apparently drafted by three people named James Bauder, Sandra Bauder and Martin Brodmann. I don’t know who any of these people are, but I was definitely not impressed by their legal draftsmanship. The groups, bodies, and individuals named as parties to the MOU are a strange assortment of entities who generally don’t have the authority attributed to them to make deals on behalf of the people they are supposed to represent. The language is a sort of “pidgin legalese”. The content seems to be something that the authors would be happy to achieve if they could only persuade the government of Canada to agree. There had never been any indication from the government that it had even read the MOU, let alone agreed to it. 

I was amused to hear Chris Barber say on November 1, 2022 that he still had never read the MOU. It really is a very difficult thing to read. I have a lot of trouble with it myself. My eyes tend to glaze over every time I attempt it. Barber said while testifying that his lawyers had called it “legal nonsense” and I endorse that description. 

I see that James Bauder is scheduled to be a witness at the Inquiry later this week, so maybe he will be able to enlighten the world about the MOU. However, I hope they don’t spend a lot of time on this thing because as far as I can tell, it was pretty much irrelevant to the government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act. I hope the government’s stance is not going to be that this pathetic piece of paper constituted an attempt to overthrow the state.