Canada’s treatment of Freedom Convoy protesters like terrorists allows it to bring in a social credit system via the backdoor
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet were urged by their American counterparts last week to put an end to the disruption of trade between the two countries caused by the Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers and their supporters, who were hanging out on the Ambassador Bridge that links Detroit, Michigan with Windsor, Ontario, and carries about a quarter of all trade between the two nations by value of goods.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg poked their noses into Canada’s domestic affairs and suggested Trudeau should “use federal powers to resolve this situation,” according to CNN.
Look, it’s really easy, eh? The truckers want freedom from mandates. These US officials want freedom to profit. So, all Trudeau had to do is give everyone the freedom they seek by dropping whatever is left of federal vaccine mandates which require, for instance, presentation of a digital ID linked to anti-Covid jabs in order to travel anywhere within or outside of the country. Then the truckers would go home, the protests would end, roads and bridges between the two countries would decongest, and life would go on as before the rapidly fading pandemic.
But Trudeau apparently did not understand the assignment – unless he thought the assignment was to do a poor imitation of a tinpot authoritarian. He had a choice. He could have responded to the American officials’ call to use “federal powers” by declaring a complete repeal of all remaining federal health restrictions. Instead, he took the term to mean a crackdown on protesters, and invoked a rare law that’s directly associated in the minds of Canadians with terrorists.
Outside of the two world wars, the War Measures Act, which became the Emergencies Act in 1988, was invoked exactly one time in the history of Canada – by Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He used it in the context of the October Crisis: a series of events in October 1970 that saw Quebec separatists kidnap a British diplomat and murder the province’s deputy premier. In other words, during a period of domestic terrorism.
Allowing for the suspension of civil liberties, the law is designed to be declared in the event of insurrection, invasion, or war. It gives the federal government special powers at times of national emergency to do things that the law would normally disallow. Like, for example, cutting off the funds of anyone it decides is involved in the protest movement.
The new rules targeting the Freedom Convoy declare it a duty of Canadian institutions to “determine on a continuing basis whether they are in possession or control of property that is owned, held or controlled by or on behalf of a designated person,” meaning “any individual or entity that is engaged, directly or indirectly, in an activity” related to the protests or convoy. The institutions that are required to block the assets of these individuals who dare express themselves peacefully against Trudeau’s sanitary authoritarianism include banks, companies, trusts, loan providers, and fundraising platforms.
In other words, if the government doesn’t like your political views, it has now introduced a mechanism by which it can deprive you of your own resources or prevent you from acquiring any. With Trudeau apparently fighting tooth and nail to maintain Canada in this state of perpetual emergency at federal level, he is ensuring the maintenance and indefinite prolongation of digital identities under the guise of health passports (at least in order to travel or, in some cases, work).
And now he has just introduced a means by which the government could leverage this declared emergency to ultimately associate someone’s identity with their political beliefs and behavior. Tack on the digital identity of the federal health passports, and you have a means of preventing people from living based on political beliefs as decided by government with just one push of a button somewhere in an increasingly interconnected and harmonized electronic system. And all without any immediate means of recourse or appeal.
The fact that the updated War Measures Act has even entered Trudeau’s mind as an option to deal with a bunch of people honking and cheering for freedom, while racking up seatbelt infractions, is incredibly troubling, particularly in light of how conciliatory he has been towards actual armed combatants – such as those in Ukraine. It’s apparently OK for Trudeau to allow Canada to train them to fight Russians and to even send lethal weapons ($7.8 million worth, to be exact) once they’re integrated into the Ukrainian Army. Canada’s alleged role in training the anti-Russian Azov Battalion proxy fighters, alongside American intelligence, as revealed by the Ottawa Citizen in November 2021, is currently under investigation by the Department of National Defense.
So, Trudeau is ordering that Canadian freedom fighters even bringing gas cans to help fuel the trucker convoy be susceptible to asset freezes, yet he’s fine with sending actual weapons to his designated “freedom fighters” in another country? OK then, just keeping score on the hypocrimeter.
Trudeau’s actions will create a chilling effect on Canadian free speech. People will think twice before expressing support for anything other than a cause that the government has deemed “lawful” – a definition no doubt subjected to the whims of those in power, like the sanitary restrictions. Indeed, the extent to which Trudeau’s government now feels comfortable extending its reach was demonstrated when Justice Minister David Larnetti rather alarmingly said, “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who’s donating [to the convoy]… you ought to be worried” about your bank account being frozen. This is the talk of a dictatorship.
It’s a far cry from the Canada that Trudeau himself promoted as an opposition member of parliament when he reminded then Prime Minister Stephen Harper of his own words from 2005. “When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent is when it’s rapidly losing its moral authority to govern.”
Trudeau isn’t just trying to cancel peaceful dissent under the guise of security. He’s single-handedly imposing a brutal systemic crackdown on it. Welcome to the very first iteration of a Chinese-style social credit regime in the Western world.
