The Freedom Convoy was and is no more than a protest by ordinary Canadians against the tyranny of vaccine mandates by Liberal Ottawa who attacked truckers who willingly worked to keep goods moving before a vaccine was developed and took the personal risks of infection to support the rest of us Canadians. Their protest is grounded in science, sensible, and a measured response to the poorly conceived vaccinate mandates that even today do not recognize that people who are healthy and under 50 have little risk of COVID and those who are infected and recover enjoy a more robust and longer lasting immunity than those who are triple vaccinated. A decision to risk infection by refusing a vaccination poses no risks to anyone except the person choosing to take the risk and the statistical evidence suggests that is a reasonable choice for young, healthy people to make.
But Justin Trudeau is uninterested in facts or science and determined to make political hay by demonstrating his determination to defeat COVID regardless of the level of intrusion into personal freedoms, Charter rights or protections under Canada’s Constitution that his edicts infringe. In a word, he is a tyrant and the success of the Freedom Convoy put his nose out of joint. In what has become a theatre of the absurd, Trudeau has declared this peaceful protest a national emergency and brought out the biggest guns at his disposal - the War Measures Act of 1914 since renamed the Emergency Act - granting the Prime Minister extraordinary powers intended to be reserved for actual emergencies like fires, floods, earthquakes, war and the like. Who knew annoying the Prime Minister was a national emergency?
Left wing media jumped on the Trudeau bandwagon to immediately vilify the truckers who were at all times peaceful, respectful and helpful to many in the communities host to their protests. It was only a short time before hackers penetrated the funding sites where Canadians made donations in support of the Freedom Convoy and started publishing the identities of the contributors to turn left wing supporters of Trudeau against the donors publicly. Yesterday, the Vancouver is awesome website published information hacked from a donor website to identify donors publicly and try to shame them. I can remember a time in Canada when donations to causes were encouraged and the privacy of donors respected. Those days are gone. No similar effort was made to publicly shame the legions of donors to left wing causes like pipeline protests nor was the Emergency Act invoked to repel protesters who shut down pipeline construction sites and blocked railroads in recent years.
The Liberal government is using its Emergency Act powers to threaten not only protesters but also anyone who supports them with donations, threatening to freeze their bank accounts, seize assets, and accuse them of criminal misconduct punishable by a fine of up to $1 million and a year in prison. This obvious example of government overreach has already seen the Canadian Civil Liberties Assocation and the Canadian Constitution Foundation bring legal actions to dismantle this Trudeau ego trip for failing to meet the legal standard for invoking the Emergency Act. The threat of a successful legal action did nothing to prevent Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland from gleefully proceeding to threaten to freeze the bank accounts and rescind the drivers’ licenses of the truckers participating in the Freedom Convoy despite their Constitutional right to peacefully protest the government policies they object to. Encouraged by Freeland and Trudeau the police have also taken steps to freeze the Bitcoin wallets of persons “tied to the protests”, language that is certain to capture donors as well as truckers. It seems that overnight Canada has turned into a police state.
Declaring a national emergency and imposing harsh penalties on people who support a protest that simply wants an end to vaccine mandates may be political cyanide for Trudeau since a majority of Canadians (vaccinated or otherwise) oppose vaccine mandates and are not impressed by a government that takes extreme measures to punish political opponents. The invocation of the Emergency Act will now face votes in the Commons and Senate and will be immediately rescinded if either vote fails to pass. Trudeau will likely survive the vote in the Commons with the support of New Democratic Party members led by Jagmeet Singh who condemns the trucker convoy (and is no doubt a bit red-faced in that his brother in law donated $13,000 to the protesters). The vote in the Senate is not so certain with 42 of 105 senators “independent” and at least 14 conservative in ideology.
Trudeau may get to keep his “emergency powers” and wield them with force to oppress the truckers but he may find them a more formidable group than he gives them credit for. If truckers generally support the protest they have the ability to grind the Canadian economy to a halt by simply resigning and refusing to drive, and threats to rescind their drivers’ licenses may turn out to be counterproductive. Canadians have historically demonstrated a strong resolve to fight tyranny abroad with legendary courage and determination displayed at Ypres, Vimy ridge and the Somme duringWorld War I and similar resolve to fight to the death if necessary in major battles in World War II. I don’t think it matters much whether the tyranny Canadians are resisting is spawned in wartime Germany or domestically in Ottawa, and Trudeau’s short-sighted invocation of the Emergency Act may surface that resolve in spades. A simpler solution would have been to simply withdraw the vaccine mandates that targeted truckers specifically or at least speak with them about resolving their grievances.
The picture of armed police dragging unarmed truckers from downtown Ottawa into police vans in handcuffs and towing rigs attempting the challenging task of removing Semi’s and trailers from the City centre will make for exciting television coverage by the national propaganda outlet known generally as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but it is unlikely to endear Trudeau to ordinary Canadians, nor is further disruption to already stretched supply chains if there are fewer truckers on the road post “emergency”. If the shortages of toilet paper at the outset of the pandemic was inconvenient, shortages of foodstuffs on store shelves will be even more inconvenient to most Canadians and Trudeau will learn that persuasion and cooperation may have been more effective than edicts and coercion in trying to achieve a result.
Trudeau has become an international disgrace and laughing stock and Canada’s reputation abroad is suffering under his leadership. He presents as smug, narcissistic, egotistical and inept and those seem to be his strengths. We will be well rid of him in Ottawa when he eventually leaves.
For the record, for the 50 years before Trudeau’s 2015 election I was a stalwart supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada. Not today.