Canada: The Crisis Is Not Over

The news cycle today is dominated by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the cognitive absence of the American president. Canada has been all but forgotten, but the situation in this country threatens to destabilize a Western democracy that shares a border with the U.S. It still requires to be addressed.

As long as Justin Trudeau and his inner cabinet remain intact, Canada will always live under the shadow of potential or imminent crisis. With the sudden and, for many, inexplicable revoking of the Emergencies Act, the country—or the best part of it—breathed a collective sigh of relief. But there is no guarantee against further irruptions to civic and political life. Our whirling dervish of a prime minister, like his favorite totalitarian regime, changes his mind “on a dime.” A man so labile and shallow cannot offer stability and democratic governance to his country, only insecurity, upheaval, and rule by edict.

It is by no means clear why Trudeau needed to invoke the Emergencies Act to dismantle and criminalize a peaceful, blue-collar trucker convoy protesting the vaccine mandates or why a brief interval later he saw fit to revoke it. One day it was necessary; the next day it was not. One theory is that Trudeau saw the polls were turning against him. Another hypothesis, as the Conservative Treehouse explains, is that the undermining of the banking system, caused by the targeting of accounts of those involved with the Freedom Convoy could not be allowed to stand because it obstructed the plans of the World Economic Forum and the collaborative use of the Canadian Bankers Association to create a digital ID system. This assumption seems implausible to me as Trudeau and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland must surely have been on the same page as their WEF masters.

A third possibility, which seems to me the most likely, is that the obligatory Senate vote, judging from the powerful speeches against the legitimacy of the Act, would have been an embarrassing rebuke to Trudeau’s dictatorial and unjustifiable actions, which may have ultimately caused a vote of no confidence in his government.

Whatever explanation we accept, there is no doubt that Trudeau overstepped his authority and was forced to beat a hasty retreat. But this is no consolation, for Trudeau and his allies will only regroup, strategize and prepare to launch another attack, or series of attacks, against the social contract and the body politic. We are still in crisis mode.

Were we in fact emerging from the crisis, certain initiatives would have been proposed and subsequently enacted. The most obvious would have been a blanket pardon to the truckers, the repair and restoration of their rigs, the return of their operating licences and insurance, and the immediate quashing of their jail sentences.

Instead, Trudeau’s staunchest provincial ally, Premier Doug Ford of Ontario who was elected as a Conservative, has shut down 39 trucking businesses and issued 27 seizure orders to large truck operators from outside Ontario, prohibiting them from operating within the province. A program of this nature, vindictive and counter-productive, will not serve to mend fences and create social peace, and will additionally penalize consumers who will find their grocery shelves growing bare. Bluntly speaking, this policy is not only myopic, it is utterly stupid. But it seems we can expect nothing less from our political leaders. As Rex Murphy writes, “They do not think in this government; mainly they poll and spin.”

Rumors continue to swirl like dust devils. As Breitbart reports, “Legislation making its way through the Canadian Parliament would allow citizens to be taken to court and penalized if they are suspected of simply intending to post ‘hate speech’ online. The proposed law encourages Canadians to report other Canadians to the authorities for intent to post hate speech online, and allows courts to punish Canadian citizens for things they haven’t done yet.” There is no official confirmation that a bill of this nature is being studied, but I would not put it past our national despot to impose a Stasi-like snitch culture upon the nation to complement its proposal to regulate the Internet (Bill C-11), making Canada’s Internet “one of the most censored and surveilled in the democratic world.” Such instruments would be only par for the course for so cynical a leader. With a compliant parliament, a WEF-motivated cabinet, and a speluncular premier like the lamentable Doug Ford, an Emergencies Act is not needed to implement totalitarian legislation.

Justin Trudeau has been temporarily displaced by Vladimir Putin; a genuine dictator provides cover for a wannabe dictator. But Trudeau is not going away. As long as our blackface prime minister and his minions remain in power, the crisis we have just lived through is only in its initial stages.