Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland furnishes an interesting case study in an apparently contradictory dynamic of incompetence and competence. As a high-ranking minister, she is clearly incompetent, having, for example, nearly deep-sixed our NAFTA treaty talks with Donald Trump. Her insistence on the inclusion of “progressive” policies, such as gender equality, labor union safeguards, a chapter dedicated to indigenous peoples, and favored environmental standards only ensured that Canada got the short end of the renewed accord. Her attempt to enact Liberal policy was politically inept.
She also exhibits a sentimental tendency to tear up at critical moments. She is famous for walking out of the EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, fighting back tears—though as former NDP Premier Bob Rae tweeted in Freeland’s patronizing defense, “Crying is not a sign of weakness, it is a natural emotional response to a lot of different situations.” Her valediction to her conference confrères was risible beyond belief. “Canada is disappointed, I am personally very disappointed, I have worked very, very hard. We have decided to go back home. I am very, very sad, really. Tomorrow morning, I will be at home with my three children.” So there!
Being on the verge of tears for not getting her way with a team of alpha males is not how the representative of a G7 nation in the midst of a tough bargaining session is expected to behave. Rather, we are witnessing the hoary cliché of the spoiled little girl whose wishes Daddy has denied, but who will eventually pout her way through any setback. This is Canada’s finance minister.
As a member of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum’s board of directors, however, she is not only competent but formidable. Some sites, like Military Wiki, Gateway Pundit, and others, have speculated that a compromised ancestry is at work. According to these sources, Freeland’s maternal grandfather Mykhailo Khomiak was the Nazi regime’s senior editor of the Ukrainian antisemitic daily newspaper Krakivs’ki visti (News of Krakow). But the past need not be prelude to the present. An individual is certainly not responsible for the sins of the father—or the grandfather—and I don’t want to indulge in baseless assumptions. Freeland is her own person and deserves to be evaluated on her own merits, as we all do.
Related: Tyranny Arrives in Canada
What is far more significant as a basis for judgment is current behavior. Her response to the famous trucker convoy in Ottawa, legally and peacefully protesting the government’s punitive COVID-19 mandates, was nothing if not totalitarian in nature. Freeland stated that banks would be able to freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order. The same would apply to vehicle insurance of anyone involved with the demonstrations. Freeland went on to say that Canada’s Terrorist Financing Rules were being broadened to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms and that she plans to make her emergency powers permanent.
Such pieces of tyrannical legislation (“without a court order”!), including the unnecessary invoking of the Emergencies Act, have served to further erode the validity of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, already relegated to the attic. Shoring up the power of the tyrant, annihilating the autonomy of the individual person, depriving people of their livelihoods, and destroying working families, such legislative instruments are reminiscent of the Nazi Enabling Act of 1933, especially Article 2 which specified that “laws enacted by the Government may deviate from the Constitution and that the rights of the President remain undisturbed.” The Enabling Act allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of Germany’s parliament, laying the ground for the Nazification of German society. (In the Canadian context, parliament actually consented, before the Act was mysteriously revoked two days after being tabled in the Commons.) We also recall the 1938 Nazi Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-owned Property, effectively freezing the assets of Jews at a certain prescribed limit. Precedents are easily set and may always apply to different sectors of the population.
Related: The Government From Hell
Cancel culture has been with us long enough to be regarded as normal. First the universities and public schools; next, the press, the political class, the legal profession, the judiciary, the sports organizations, and the entertainment industry; then the digital information networks and medical colleges; and now the credit card companies, banks, credit unions, pension accounts, funding venues, and investment holdings—all have been infiltrated, all have toppled like dominoes before the progressivist onslaught against the tenure of liberal democracies.
In Canada, even the history of the nation’s most important prime ministers is being scrubbed. Chief archivist Leslie Weir of Library and Archives Canada has purged thousands of pages, including a biography of Canada’s father of confederation and first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald. “Content that is deemed redundant or outdated is being removed from the web,” she explained.
But the key is currency. When access to banking services and financial institutions in general is suspended or “canceled,” the die has been irrevocably cast. Autocratic governments and multinational corporations—the symbiosis is technically known as fascism—will determine the conduct of daily life and the very possibility of survival. Tanks and gulags are no longer necessary. Devices like the Emergencies Act can be safely tucked away. Wielding currency as a weapon to stifle dissent, enforce conformity, and disenfranchise citizens is far more effective. Arbitrary authority in the economic domain with the complicity of the fiscal institutions is all that is needed to transform a democratic state into a fascist regime. This is Freeland’s strong point and almost certainly her brainchild, as well as an abuse of her portfolio.
Freeland—so ironically named—is the power behind the throne. She does not have the gallic flair and svelte presence of Trudeau, but she has the smarts that Trudeau evidently lacks plus the ferocious grit of a deeply autocratic personality in excess of Trudeau’s glib and feckless temperament. Those who would lobby the Governor-General for the dismissal of Trudeau should reconsider what they wish for. Freeland, who is next in line, would compensate for her ineptitude as a finance minister with a demagogic facility and ruthless competence the country has never seen the likes of, using finance not as a discipline but a bludgeon to impose the revolutionary agenda of the Great Reset with no constraining inhibitions. If Trudeau is the frying pan, Freeland is the fire.
House of Anansi Press has announced it will be publishing a “Major biography of the most powerful woman in Canadian politics” which, according to Maclean’s Magazine, “will feed into a growing perception that the finance minister will gun for the top job whenever Justin Trudeau steps aside.” Freeland’s accession to the office of the prime minister would be the final nail in the coffin called Canada. The tandem of Trudeau and Freeland is in process of remorselessly erasing the identity of the country as we knew it. A power transfer will only make things worse. Trudeau means trouble, but Freeland means business.
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