As many of us expected, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided to invoke the War Measures Act, euphemistically renamed the Emergency Act, to put an end to the trucker protests by according greater powers to the police to detain, arrest, and fine protesters and to forcibly dismantle the blockades. These measures are “about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people’s jobs, and restoring confidence in our institutions,” Trudeau announced.
The Act will also enable financial institutions to suspend services to both corporate and individual clients who are suspected of aiding the convoys. “The illegal blockades,” said Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, “have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms, and some of the payment service providers they use, are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act.” Moreover, truckers’ accounts will be frozen and vehicle insurance suspended. The blockades, in her official perspective, are “illegal” and are “damaging the Canadian economy.”
We might note that there is nothing illegal about the trucker convoys, whose protests are far more benign than the earlier government-approved BLM riots that wracked the country. The economic argument is equally disingenuous. The putative economic damage is precisely what the politicians have inflicted on the nation over two years of job-killing mandatory repression, bankruptcies galore, and the inordinate printing of fiat money, causing devaluation of purchasing power and rampant inflation. The hypocrisy is beyond all bounds of both morality and reason.
The Emergency Act defines a national emergency as follows:
- a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it; or b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada.
It is intended mainly to deal with, natural disasters, disease outbreaks (in this case pretty well over), destructive attacks against the integrity of the country perpetrated by foreign actors or revolutionary insurgents prepared to use massive military violence against it. It is, we recall, essentially a war measures act, despite its renaming. The current situation plainly does not satisfy the category of catastrophe for which the emergency powers were intended.
Related: The Canadian Dilemma in a Nutshell
The War Measures Act has been deployed only twice in the modern history of Canada, and both times by the same left-wing family dynasty. Pierre Trudeau invoked it during the 1970 “October Crisis” in response to the Front de Libération du Québéc’s (FLQ) campaign of public mayhem, and now by the son in response to a legitimate protest against the government’s draconian Covid measures and mandates that have crippled the country. In neither case was a war footing necessary. In the first instance, as many believe, police had all the tools needed to track down and arrest the insurrectionists; a military presence was unnecessary. In the second, the willingness to meet with the truckers, to engage in dialogue, and to consider relaxing the Covid restrictions, as is now occurring in many countries and states around the world, would have been sufficient to defuse the situation. The current national disruption is mainly due to the prime minister’s impolitic intransigence.
The question many are left with is highly disturbing. What is it about the Trudeaus that they can so readily resort to the most extreme measures in order to quell a social disruption that could have been managed in a far more effective way? The upshot can only be what we are now beginning to witness: growing dissension and an increasingly broken country.
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