Our Team
Sonya Anderson – Executive director
Sonya is passionate about civic engagement. She believes that communities and nations thrive when citizens take agency and become engaged stakeholders. As the Executive Director of the Institute for Freedom and Justice (IFJ), she collaborates with her team to develop resources to educate Canadians on important matters of legal and political significance. Concerned over the erosion of Canadian civil and constitutional rights in recent years, Sonya is driven to empower and motivate her fellow citizens to take action in their local communities through civic engagement.
Whether leading grass-roots initiatives, such as successfully challenging outsiders from building an ethanol plant in the heart of her city, or chairing various committees for the national organization, the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, Sonya has demonstrated skill at leveraging networks of people that collaborate to positively affect change.
A lifelong traveller and patriotic Canadian, she has witnessed first-hand the role that Canada has played bringing peace to many countries around the world, while helping them achieve freer and more democratic societies. But Canadians have been taking their own freedom and democratic rights for granted, making them especially vulnerable to policies that are anything but democratic. Sonya believes it’s time for Canadians to start asking questions of the elected and unelected officials that govern our nation and to start pressing for the characteristics that lead to good governance, namely, transparency and accountability.
Karl Harrison – Director
Born in 1963, and the son of a WWII veteran, Karl graduated from University of London, in 1984 with a BSc Honours degree in geology.
Based in London between 1984 and 2009 Karl opened, operated, and sold many successful restaurants, bars, and music & comedy venues. In 2011 he was named one of the top twenty most influential people in the UK hospitality trade. He has found success as a real estate investor and developer since 1987 and involved in the travel sector since 2000, Karl is a co-founder and co-owner of a well-known family holiday brand operating in the UK, France, Spain and Ireland.
In sport Karl was a co-founder/investor at Seattle SeaWolves which took the silverware in the first two seasons of Major League Rugby in the United States. He has been an occasional contributing writer for UK satirical magazine Private Eye. He has co-produced a series of award- winning short horror films. A campaigner for reform of abusive practices in the UK pub sector Karl was instrumental in The Fair Pint Campaign culminating in a change to UK law after the successful defeat of the Cameron government on the issue in House of Commons and the passage of a private member’s bill.
A committed lifelong campaigner for civil liberties, Karl was deeply concerned by the imposition of draconian public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic, and which appeared to gouge deeply into the rights and freedoms of all Canadians. Along with Shaun Rickard in Ontario, Karl launched a strategic Federal Court challenge to the Trudeau government’s requirement for proof of vaccination for travel. The case is currently in the Federal Court of Appeal. At the same time Karl met the founder of the Canadian Constitutional Foundation and former federal MP, John Weston. From this collaboration came the idea to launch the Institute for Freedom & Justice with an energetic focus on constitutional education, civic engagement and highly strategic litigation.
Since 2009 Karl has lived in Vancouver, Canada, with Emma, his partner of 30 years and their two children. After family his other passions include travel, wine, cooking, flyfishing, big spaces, hunting, film, IPA, growing anything, being on his boat off the BC coast, music, trying to be better at playing the guitar, generally realizing that we aren’t here for very long at all, and motorbikes……
