How do you do it? It’s like you’re a psychic gifted with an intuitive capacity far beyond the range of normal people. I would never have known the truckers were racist just by looking at them, but apparently you can spot it from a mile away! And how did you know that they have “unacceptable views” without ever talking to them? Genius! Is this the result of special training or were you born this way? I must confess I’m so old-fashioned I still need racists to actually do or say something racist before I know I’m dealing with one. I was singing your praises to Mrs Trevor in Trimley only this morning and she agreed you have special gifts. (Actually she said you have special needs, she gets mixed up sometimes.) My Great Aunt Mabel had the gift too, but sadly those were different times and she was institutionalised. Perhaps when you die you should leave your brain to ‘the science?’
But I know you’re a busy man so I shall get to my point. I should tell you that it is Mrs Trevor in Trimley who prompted me to pen you this letter. She rightly brought to my attention that she has recently sent money (£20 as a birthday gift) to a cousin who emigrated to Canada in 1983, and she is now understandably concerned that Laurence may have gone off the rails since then and joined the ranks of the many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have become racists, misogynists and terrorists during your premiership. Between you and me, I always had misgivings about “long haired Larry” and would not be the least bit surprised to see him flying a banner inscribed with provocative white supremacist language on it like, ‘freedom!’ (Yeah, sure Larry, freedom for whites like you but what about freedom for people who like to black up on social occasions?)
Mrs Trevor in Trimley’s concern, of course, is that her largesse may be mistaken for funding terrorism and that her bank account could be frozen, or worse, that she might be kicked out of the Women’s Institute if her name emerges on a list of supporters of working class struggles against the powerful, and all as a result of her being thoughtlessly generous to a person without first checking the acceptability of his current views. I offer my sincere apologies for my wife’s generous nature and would like to make a suggestion that I hope makes up for it.
To help us, and other non-Canadians, avoid making similar missteps in future, may I ask that you put in place a clear system that clarifies the views held by Canadian people we may come into contact with. My suggestion is that you ask Canadians to answer a simple “acceptable views” questionnaire, perhaps on a weekly basis? If their answers are published online we’ll be able to see whether or not we’re funding terrorism when we send them money for charitable causes they support, or money at birthdays and Christmas, etc.
My suggested ten questions are:
Do you like Justin Trudeau?
Do you admire Justin Trudeau?
Are you now or have you ever been a member of a political party that opposes Justin Trudeau?
Do you want Justin Trudeau to utterly destroy the Canadian economy to prevent you from feeling under the weather for a week or two?
Do you think Justin Trudeau bears a passing resemblance to any notable Cubans?
Do you think Justin Trudeau is right (they shouldn’t even need to read the rest of this question) that the truckers’ convoy is just as serious an emergency situation as World Wars 1 and 2?
Do you think Justin Trudeau should stay in hiding for the rest of his life, yes or no? (This is a trick question Justin to confuse anyone who thinks they can cheat the test!)
Can you, hand on heart, state that Justin Trudeau is right that there are ZERO treatments that work against COVID except for the glorious vaccines that will save the world?
Would Canada be better off abandoning democracy entirely and installing Justin Trudeau as Supreme Leader?
Would you like to see Justin Trudeau as President of a one world government?
_____
My grading system would be:
10 pro-Trudeau answers = Acceptable views.
Anything less = A gulag in Saskatchewan, or just Saskatchewan, whichever is harder to escape from.
Once again, please accept our apologies and know that I am fully in support of your stance AGAINST wanting people to die of COVID, and AGAINST racists, misogynists, transphobics, homophobics, terrorists, and everything else that’s impossible for anyone to publicly support, and that you’ve so cleverly founded your political ideology on. Who could ever argue successfully with any of that??!!
Please be assured that any unfortunate error made by Mrs Trimley was just carelessness with her innate human desire to give generously to people less well off than herself and should not be interpreted as a hostile act towards you personally or anyone else lacking those instincts. We’re on your side! To prove it, I have begun a fundraiser with GoFundMe.com to support your campaign to be Dictator of Canada! This is gonna be huge! I’ve kicked it off with a pound. You’re on your way!
PS. I’ve just watched a couple of YouTube videos of the truckers and now you’ve pointed it out, it’s so clear they’re racist! The black racist truckers I saw were obviously the worst. Who are they even racist against??? Is it white people or themselves??? Please advise.
Trevor in Trimley writes open letters to people who should know better. You can read more of his work on his substack.
While all eyes have been on Canada, there also have been massive Freedom Convoys, and joyous multitudes applauding them, and turning out to help them, all around the world. We’re seeing it (despite the usual blackout by the quisling media) in Australia, where 1.4 million vehicles, and between one and two million protestors, have taken over Canberra, Australia’s capital, the people calling for an end to all restrictions, and the ouster of that once-free country’s quisling politicians. There, too, the biggest protest in that nation’s history has been just as peaceful as it is diverse—a wondrous mass display of solidarity, to re-assert our fundamental human rights, spontaneously led by many thousands of real workers.
So where’s “the left”? Australia’s “left” is on the other side—just like “the left” in the United States and Canada, there being no diversity among them, as they’re all one in their boiling hatred of that mass resistance, and in fanatical support of the state/corporate juggernaut coercing universal “vaccination.” So, on this unprecedented global confrontation, there is no disagreement whatsoever between US “leftists” like Noam Chomsky (the first public figure to propose detention of the “unvaccinated), Amy Goodman, Michael Moore (“Get off my fucking bridge!”), Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, the Trotskyites at WSWS, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Stalinist noisemaker Bob Avakian, the liberals at MoveOn, and many of the “woke” contributors to Truthout, Nation of Change, Truthdig, Counterpunch, Portside, the Progressive and The Nation. Nor, on this working-class resistance to the bio-fascist order, is the fearfully like-minded US “left” in any disagreement with its counterpart in Canada, typified by Naomi Klein (who deems the Great Reset a “boring” topic), Henry A. Giroux (who says the truckers are attempting to destroy democracy), “woke” neo-Nazi Justin Trudeau (whose government trained Ukraine’s feral National Guard), and the sanctimonious rabble of Canada’s “left” parties (and let’s throw Neil Young in there, too); so that “the left” throughout all North America is absolutely unified against the workers.
And so is the Australian “left,” as the doggedly Marxist Red Fire demonstrates in “Straw Man: ‘Fascism’ in the Freedom Movement,” a devastating piece out just today, nailing the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), Socialist Alternative (SAlt), Solidarity, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the Trostkyist Platform (TP), the Communist Workers Party of Australia (CWPA), the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the Socialist Alliance (SA) for their hostility to the assembly in Canberra—a multitude “largely middle-aged and Anglo-European,” as SA’s Green Left Weekly airily (and inaccurately) sneers. While it’s hard to picture Julian Assange condemning the protesters in his country (what they’ve done to him is what they also plan to do, eventually, to every COVID dissident), it’s even harder to hear Caitlin Johnstone’s voice amid the protest in Australia—since she’s written nothing on what’s happening in her country (though she lives in Melbourne, right under Dan Andrews’ iron heel).
Red Fire admirably nails what’s happening everywhere:
Despite the largest political movement in modern history consistently mobilising against government repression which is a clear move to replace liberal democracy with fascism, the Covid left (formerly the lockdown left) have instead decided to double and triple down on their abject betrayal of the working class. As we have previously argued, the treachery of the ostensible left parties on Covid surpasses that of August 4, 1914. At that time, virtually all “socialist” parties the world over backed “their own” ruling class and marched into the slaughter of the first World War.[6] Today the Covid left, from the very start of the civil war launched by big finance capital, have aggressively sided with “their own” imperialism while having the temerity to lambaste millions of working and oppressed people as “far-right” or “fascist” for mobilising against Covid fascism.
Thus “the left” has finally moved beyond the fatal splintering tendency that paralyzed the (real) left from the days of Marx and Engels through the Sixties and Seventies (when such splintering was deftly aggravated by the FBI and CIA and their affiliates worldwide). Whereas such total solidarity was once envisioned as the surest means of liberating all the “workers of the world,” this “left” has come to it at last by squaring off against the working class— and so against the rest of us as well.
And so it’s time now for the rest of us to recognize that this “left” is itself the enemy it used to warn against—a “left” that hates the working class, and wants to see its independence smashed, its peaceful protests halted everywhere, whatever that may take, so that those “far right” truckers stop insisting on their “freedom,” get their boosters and go back to work, delivering the goods that “leftists” need from Amazon. Thus this “left” is on exactly the same page as John D. Rockefeller when he had the miners massacred in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, and as Leon Trotsky when his troops crushed the Kronstadt insurrection in 1921. To put the case in a more timely way, this “left” wants to see the working class throughout the West controlled as tightly as it is in China, where there are no strikes or labor unions, guns are not allowed, everyone is always under absolute surveillance, and dissidence is likely to be punished with financial strangulation, as Justin Trudeau is now trying to starve the truckers into silence, in collusion with GoFundMe and the banks—a fascist combination that this fascist “left” applauds, to its eternal shame.
So let’s agree that this “left” has to go, along with all the predatory players that it now serves with such unprecedented unity and livid zeal. And as we call it out for what it really is, let’s also stop dividing We the People into “left” and “right,” because those terms are finally meaningless in this apocalyptic fight, in which you’re either on the side of right, or in the wrong.
Police have started to erect fencing around the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa, Canada, and have brought in extra officers in a push to clear the demonstration. The move comes after the truckers were threatened with arrest under emergency powers enacted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Video footage captured on Thursday showed busloads of police arriving in downtown Ottawa, and officers purportedly holding crowd control drills. Meanwhile, workers were seen putting up metal fencing near the demonstration, which has brought traffic in the center of the Canadian capital to a standstill for nearly three weeks now.
Shortly after these videos surfaced, Ottawa Police announced that “residents are seeing a major increase in the number of police officers on our streets.” The force also stated that barriers and fencing are going up around the “core” of downtown Ottawa, cutting the protest off from the rest of the city. Only those who live and work within this area will be allowed to pass the barriers.
“The unlawful protesters must leave the area and will not be provided access,” Ottawa Police stated on Twitter.
Cops on Wednesday began handing out fliers to the protesters, warning them that they could face arrest if they refuse to leave. The notices also said that, thanks to emergency powers enacted by Trudeau on Monday, those traveling to Ottawa to join the protest are now also breaking the law, and face the risk of having their vehicles seized.
“We’re going to take back the entirety of the downtown core and every occupied space,” interim police chief Steve Bell told city councilors on Wednesday evening, adding that his officers would “remove this unlawful protest” and “return our city to a state of normalcy” in the coming days.
The emergency powers invoked by Trudeau also allow the government to order bank accounts linked with the protest frozen, and to suspend the trucking licenses of participants.
On Monday, the Canadian government announced drastic plans to freeze the bank accounts of protesters associated with the Freedom Convoy – a movement that’s standing against vaccine mandates. However, the government document containing these plans, which was published by the Canadian government late Tuesday night, reveals that the financial restrictions will extend far beyond bank accounts and can be used to target anyone who’s deemed to have “indirectly” engaged in the protests.
The new government order applies to a wide range of entities including banks, fundraising platforms, insurance companies, investment firms, loan companies, securities dealers, credit unions, and fraternal benefit societies.
It requires these entities to determine whether they’re dealing with a “designated person” which is defined as “any individual or entity that is engaged, directly or indirectly” in prohibited activities under the Emergencies Act. These prohibited activities include any “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace” and include the activities of the Freedom Convoy protesters which Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau branded “illegal blockades.”
If these entities determine that they are dealing with a designated person, they’re required to:
Freeze the designated person’s property (which includes funds and virtual currency)
Cease providing “any financial or related services” to the designated person (insurance policies that were valid prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act on Monday and not associated with vehicles that are deemed to be engaging in prohibited activities are exempt from this provision)
Report the designated person to the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) or the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)
Report any “suspicious transactions” from the designated person to Canada’s anti-money laundering agency FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada)
These entities have also been granted full immunity against civil lawsuits for any actions they take to comply with this order.
You can read the full Canadian government order here.
CBC also spoke with a senior Canadian government official who said that police could gather the names and license plate numbers of protesters and share this information with FINTRAC.
A former CSIS senior strategic analyst, Jessica Davis, added that freezing and seizing funds under these new rules is “likely to put a lot of financial pressure on the people who are participating in the protest” and that “it’s going to be very difficult for them.”
Canadian Justice Minister David Lametti even suggested that these sweeping new powers would be used to target those who are part of the “pro-Trump movement” when he was asked about whether those who donated to the Freedom Convoy because of their opposition to vaccine mandates should be worried about their bank accounts being frozen.
“If you are a member of… a pro-Trump movement who’s donating hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you oughta be worried,” Lametti said.
Shortly after the Canadian government announced these sweeping financial surveillance and censorship measures, the RCMP issued an order to all FINTRAC regulated companies in Canada and demanded that they cease transacting with 34 crypto wallets that are allegedly associated with the Freedom Convoy’s fundraising efforts. The order also demands that these companies report “any information about a transaction or proposed transaction” related to these addresses.
Greg Taylor, chief investment officer of fund manager Purpose Investments Inc., told BNN Bloomberg Television that the Trudeau government’s order had “caught everyone off guard.”
Philippe Jette, senior consultant to the Rivemont Crypto Fund, described the censorship of money as “something we see in an authoritarian country, not one like Canada” and warned that “freezing accounts for political reasons is a big, big slippery slope.”
No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.
-Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell’s Rutli Oath
Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny?
The “monarchy of the north” certainly isn’t something that exudes revolutionary sentiment- having been founded on such non-revolutionary principles as “Peace, Order and Good Governance” which have stood in stark contrast to the significantly more inspiring “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” enshrined in the founding documents of our southern cousins. Even our founding 1867 document (drafted over a champagne fueled month of hedonism in 1864) explicitly calls out the purpose of confederation not as a means of “supporting the general welfare” as was the case of the USA’s constitution in 1787, but rather “to promote the interests of the British Empire”.
But here it is.
Countless thousands of patriots have driven across the country to bunker down in Ottawa in peace and high festive spirits which I had to see with my own eyes to believe demanding something so simple and un-tainted by ideology: freedom to work, provide for families and a respect for basic rights as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a 1982 upgrade to the embarrassingly oligarchical British North America Act of 1867).
Mainstream media and political hacks have been working overtime to paint the Freedom convoy that converged on Ottawa on January 29 as an “insurrectionist movement” full of “white supremacists”, “Russian stooges”, and “Nazis” out to “overthrow the government”. Even the Bank of England’s former governor (and World Economic Forum Trustee) Mark Carney chimed in on February 7 stating that “this is sedition” and that “those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law”. Carney, the perennial financial darling of Goldman Sachs and the City of London (and Prime Ministerial hopeful) called for a targeting of all those who donated money to this domestic terror operation.
Faced with an organic civil rights movement of blue-collar truckers, farmers and tens of thousands of supporters who have convened on Canada’s capital to demand a restoration of their basic freedoms, the current Liberal government has failed to show even an ounce of humanity or capacity to negotiate. This shouldn’t be a surprise for those who have seen the hypocrisy of neo-liberal “rules-based” order ideologues in action over the past few years who are quick to celebrate the “liberty” of citizens of Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang when the outcome benefits the geopolitical aims of detached technocrats hungry for global hegemony. The moment genuine self-organized labor movements arise demanding basic rights be recognized, then the masks come off and the raging tyrants show their true faces.
So instead of negotiation and discussion around principled constitutional issues as the protestors have requested, we have instead seen only threats, slander and more threats ranging from cutting off $10 million of funding raised on GoFundMe on February 4, and then another $8 million raised on GiveSendGo on February 10. We have seen the government impose a state of emergency first in the city of Ottawa followed by a full province wide state of emergency on February 11 justifying cutting off vital supplies of fuel to those truckers and their families who have been camped out in -22 degree Celsius temperatures. Edicts making it illegal to provide supplies to the protestors under threat of fines ranging up to $100,000 dollars and one year in prison have been drafted and the patriotic citizens who have organized for their right to not live under a dictatorship have been stigmatized by the media relentlessly as “insurgents”.
Emergency Measures Act invoked
Then on February 14, Justin Trudeau, followed by Deputy Prime Minister and WEF-Trustee Chrystia Freeland took turns announcing the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act which itself had formerly been known as “The War Measures Act” last invoked nearly 50 years earlier by Justin’s father Pierre Elliot Trudeau as a “solution” to the RCMP-directed terror cells deployed across Quebec and culminating in the month-long ‘October Crisis’ of 1970. The name was changed in 1988 although it is in function entirely identical.
Under the Emergency Measures Act, the Deep State of Canada managing Trudeau has adopted the Mark Carney program outlined on February 7 of targeting bank accounts of all Canadians either involved with the convoy directly or having supported the convoy via online donations or cryptocurrencies. What might those individuals suffer for the crime of having offered support or participation in the protests? Those ‘deplorable insurgents’ are facing the threat of seeing their bank accounts indefinitely frozen, and if they own businesses, having their insurance policies cancelled. The ‘big 5’ banks of Canada have thus been “deputized” and given full legal protections from being sued by those whose lives will be damaged by the shutdown of bank accounts.
One thing has become apparent thus far: the threats are not working with truckers and other protestors renewing their commitments to remain in place and even four Provincial Premiers (from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Manitoba) denouncing the emergency measures.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has also loudly denounced the Act saying“the federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the emergencies act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: The act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes… Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ and when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada”.
Fissures Across the Establishment
Due to the inflexible Borg-like inability to negotiate with an organic civil rights movement suffered by all technocratic Davos-creatures, major fissures have begun to break throughout the political establishment of Canada.
Already two members of the Liberal Party have gone renegade breaking with Canada’s holy system of whips and loyalty to party above conscience demanding that Trudeau repeal the immensely unpopular and useless covid measures. On February 8, Liberal MP Joel Lightbound commented that Trudeau’s vile generalizations of the protestors have only served to “wedge divide and stigmatize” Canadians making the point that he has only seen a wide diversity of races attend the freedom convoy in Ottawa and across the provinces. One day later, a second Liberal MP Yves Robillard broke party ranks re-emphasizing his support for Lightbound’s statements and warned that many others within the party share these dissenting views and will soon speak out if changes are not effected soon.
In the Conservative Party, a coup of sorts took place on February 3 when opposition leader Erin O’Toole was ousted by his own caucus for sounding too much like a World Economic Forum ghoul and for the first time in over two years, an actual counter voice of opposition can be heard in the halls of parliament with demands by every single Conservative member of parliament to end the lockdown mandates and support the nation-wide protest movement.
On provincial levels, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and PEI have announced a repeal of their covid mandates including vaccination passports, while Quebec has stepped back from the anti-vaccination tax which was threatened by Premier Legault until only a week ago.
Even NDP head Jagmeet Singh who had labelled all protestors white supremacists just a few days ago reversed his tune- perhaps due to the overwhelming presence of Sikhs in the federal and provincial convoys.
Freedom Convoy Nightmares for Technocrats in USA and Europe
Meanwhile the Biden Administration has given its full support to Justin Trudeau to use the full force of federal power to shut down the protests (conflagrating the blockade of US-Canada trade in Windsor and Manitoba as being tied directly to the Ottawa protests… which it isn’t).
Perhaps Biden is concerned that the example of the convoy has spread not only across nations of the Trans Atlantic Community and Five Eyes cage, but also to the USA itself where a parallel American freedom convoy will leave Southern California for Washington D.C. on March 5 involving tens of thousands of American truckers.
Former Obama Asst. Sec. of Homeland Security and frequent CNN commentator Juliette Kayyem delivered her disturbing comments to this festering problem which must be stopped at all costs saying: “Trust me, I will not run out of ways to make this hurt: cancel their insurance; suspend their drivers licenses’ prohibit any future regulatory certification for truckers etc. Have we learned nothing? These things faster when there are no consequences”
How this process will unfold in the coming days and weeks is impossible to determine. The illusion of liberal democracy which fueled self-aggrandizing virtue signaling technocrats lecturing “bad” authoritarian states of Eurasia how freedom should work has collapsed.
One thing is certain.
Those tyrants living in their ivory tower echo chambers demanding the world to conform to their ideal post-nation state utopias are panicking as they have no idea how to interact with actual human beings organizing themselves around such non-mathematical principles as “freedom”, “justice” and “rights” which are inalienable to all citizens- even if they live under a monarchy.
The Canadian Federal government has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time ever, for what we were told only recently is a “fringe minority” of protestors.
Trudeau’s language has been carefully nationalistic and his style contained while discussing the protestors. He repeatedly makes appeals for the “safety” of all Canadians. His case sounds reasonable:
“Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives,” he said. “It has to stop.”
But the pursuit of safety can become a danger when it leads an alarmed populace to acquiesce to increasingly strong-arm government.
The language used by Trudeau also subverts ideas that would typically appeal to liberals. He has declared the protestors to be “anti-vaxxers”, “racist” and “misogynist”. They are bad people, and therefore we should stand against them.
Unfortunately for Trudeau – although fortunately for the reputations of the freedom convoy truckers – the cat was out of the bag when we saw footage of protestors of all ethnicities, peacefully singing and dancing in the streets. Even Joël Lightbound, a member of Trudeau’s same party, has accused the prime minister of trying “to divide and to stigmatise” the unvaccinated.
I suspect Trudeau may even have welcome a little violence to justify a strong dispersement of this protest, but it has remained remarkably peaceable.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that banks and financial institutions would be able to freeze the bank accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order. The truckers’ insurance licenses can be revoked. The police will have new powers to fine and imprison protestors.
Freeland said they were broadening Canada’s “Terrorist Financing” rules to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms as part of the effort. Well, naturally. Imagine being able to bypass fiduciary totalitarianism – must put a stop to that!
This should be a huge wake up call to people. If western liberal democracies (in the case of Canada, I use this term more lightly than I would like at the moment) go down the route of programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), governments will be able to swiftly switch off access to money, or specific products and services, if they do not like your behaviour. Here in the UK, the Treasury and the Bank of England are exploring a potential UK CBDC, and identity-based programmable money is under consideration. As I have already written, all that glitters is not gold. Add to this the subjective complexities of defining terrorism and the problem is self-evident.
Shutting down protest and blanket defunding a large group of protestors is a bad look for liberalism. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said in a statement that the standard for invoking the Emergencies Act “has not been met”. The media will be dissecting whether this step was overreach for weeks to come. Those with a liberal heart know it is overreach now. If you support Trudeau’s action, you might as well support setting up a Chinese-style social credit system.
The battle lines are being redrawn. We are no longer engaged in a fight against a virus, but a fight for liberal values and against despotism.
On Monday, the Toronto Star called the Trudeau regime’s “decision to invoke the Emergencies Act (for the first time in Canadian history) an admission of failure…at all levels of government.”
Canada’s National Post reported that opposition parties slammed what they called his “proof of failure” to deal with activism by truckers.
“Premiers of Quebec, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba expressed opposition” to his draconian action.
Trudeau’s minority regime needs support from at least one opposition party to gain parliamentary approval of what no one should support.
Interim Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen called his usurpation of power “ham-fisted,” adding:
“Provinces are not in agreement with” his action.
He “wedge divide(d) and stigmatize(d) Canadians who he doesn’t agree with.”
“And by doing so, he creates so many barriers in terms of trying to solve this problem.”
Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre tried having things both ways by saying:
“I’ve always been against blockades and I still am now because I don’t believe you can gain your freedom by blocking someone else’s.”
“So yes to peaceful protests. No to blockades.”
Ontario premier Doug Ford expressed support for Trudeau’s tyrannical action.
Passage calls itself a publication that “offers left-wing perspectives on politics, economics, and culture from Canadian writers and thinkers.”
In response to the Trudeau regime’s usurpation of draconian powers, it called his action “a dangerous mistake,” adding:
It’s “undisputed proof that the state is using its heaviest hand to break their movement” to reverse justice denied.
“Canadians need to keep in mind that this crisis has been entirely invented by people in power.”
“The only (solution) is another collective attack on the civil liberties of Canadians? Are we actually supposed to believe this?”
The Toronto Sun denounced Trudeau for “go(ing) too far,” adding:
His “unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country.”
“The only real violence so far has been a vehicular ramming conducted against protesters, which sent four people to hospital.”
“You don’t hear much about that though. Trudeau never condemned it.”
“Instead, (he) called protesters every name in the book even though they are a diverse crowd in every sense of the word.”
His draconian actions show that he “wants more division and more hostility.”
Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney slammed his Monday action, saying:
“We have all of the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order.”
What Trudeau invoked on Monday will likely heighten tensions more than already.
Executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Joanna Baron, slammed his incompetence to deal with legitimate grievances.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman supports wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively at the expense of the general welfare he abhors.
His opposition to activism by Canadian truckers for restoration of lost freedoms didn’t surprise.
Instead of explaining what it’s all about, he called freedom-fighting “economic vandalism and intimidation (sic).”
He lied claiming that mass-protesters by Canadian truckers nationwide “isn’t a grassroots uprising (sic).”
Along with legions of supporters, people involved represent most all segments of society.
Not according to Krugman’s perversion of reality, falsely calling Canadian freedom fighters “right-wing extremists (sic).”
Downplaying their numbers to a few thousand, he ignored tens of thousands involved in Canada nationwide with widespread public support.
Saying the mission of freedom-fighting truckers is “all about… causing economic damage” is typical of how his columns consistently turn truth on its head.
The same goes for saying:
“The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.”
There’s nothing illegal about fighting for justice, for going all-out for restoration of lost freedoms, for opposing tyrannical rule.
The problem with Krugman and likeminded ideologues is that he and they support the latter at the expense of the former.
A website has claimed to have obtained a trove of personal data from Freedom Convoy donors, as the main fundraising platform for the backers of the Canadian anti-vaccine mandate truckers suffered an alleged hack and went offline on Monday.
The Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) whistleblower site announced it had been given 30 megabytes of information on the donors of the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo, including names, email addresses, zip codes and IP addresses.
This data won’t be made available to the public, but will only be provided to “journalists and researchers” due to its sensitive personal nature, according to DDoS.
Meanwhile, GiveSendGo – which became the main crowdfunding hub for the protesters after the mainstream platform GoFundMe blocked donations to them on February 5 – remained unresponsive on Monday.
Those visiting the site were met with a message saying: “Application is under maintenance, we will be back very soon.”
Media reports said GiveSendGo had been breached overnight, with its front page replaced by a clip from Disney’s animated movie ‘Frozen’, suggesting that its operations and money have been frozen too.
The video also contained a manifesto, in which the hackers labeled the site’s donors “grifters and hatriots,” while accusing them of funding “the insurrection in Ottawa” and the Capitol riots in the US on January 6 last year.
The Freedom Convoy demonstrations began in late January over Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s demand for unvaccinated truckers to quarantine after coming back to Canada from the US.
The protest escalated quickly and saw roads and border crossings blocked across Canada, including the capital, Ottawa, with those taking part also decrying Covid-19 lockdowns and mask mandates, along with calling for Trudeau’s resignation.
Supporters of the cause allegedly gathered $8 million online to continue rallying, but a Canadian judge issued an injunction blocking the money for the Freedom Convoy over the weekend.
Late on Sunday, the Canada Border Services Agency said it had ejected the last remaining demonstrator from the border with the US in Windsor, Ontario, reopening North America’s busiest trade link after a six-day blockade.
The Canadian government has moved to extend its financial regulations to crowdfunding platforms and cryptocurrencies, under the Emergencies Act invoked Monday to crack down on “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests against Covid-19 mandates.
Under the emergency, which is due to last 30 days unless extended, all crowdfunding and crypto platforms must register with Canada’s financial intelligence agency FinTrac and report “large or suspicious” transactions, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Monday. This is an expansion of Canada’s existing money-laundering and terrorist financing rules, and the government will propose a law that would make these powers permanent, she added.
“We know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity which is damaging the Canadian economy,” said Freeland.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has declared trucker protests – from the “Freedom Convoy” parking in front of the parliament in Ottawa to the blockades at three border crossings with the US – to be illegal and authorized federal police to help provinces and local authorities dismantle them.
Canadian banks have also been instructed to freeze assets or “review their relationship” with anyone they suspect of being involved in such protests, without a court order. Companies whose trucks are being used in the “illegal” protests will have their accounts frozen and their insurance suspended, said Freeland.
The financial crackdown comes after Ottawa successfully pressured GoFundMe to freeze some CAN $10 million the trucker protest had raised, only to see the fundraiser move to GiveSendGo, a rival US platform. After GiveSendGo refused Canadian orders to freeze the funds, it was hacked and the trucker donor list was published online.
This is the first time Canada has invoked the Emergencies Act since it was passed in 1988, to replace the old martial law first enacted in 1914. The War Measures Act had been used during the two world wars to impose controls on the Canadian economy and imprison citizens of German, [Italian] and Japanese origin. It was most recently used in 1970 by Trudeau’s father Pierre, to crack down on Francophone separatists in Quebec who had kidnapped a lawmaker. Almost 500 people were arrested during the period now known as the October Crisis.
As the Canadian freedom convoy rolls on and continues to influence other protesters around the globe, Canadian media continues to push outright disinformation by suggesting that the Russian government is behind the movement.
When the convoy first came to prominence at the end of January, state broadcaster the Canadian Broadcasting Company began spreading completely unfounded claims that “Russian actors” were present among the Canadian truckers holding up major cities including Ottawa and Toronto, as well as border crossings.
The tenuous reasoning behind the theory is that Canada has expressed support for Ukraine during the country’s ongoing tensions with Russia.
Rather than admit that working class truckers are sick of enforced restrictions and vaccine mandates threatening their livelihoods, CBC floated the crackpot idea that Vladimir Putin is secretly behind the protests.
CBC continues to push the conspiracy theory, with correspondent Harry Forestell filing the following report Friday giving airtime to ‘New Brunswick cybersecurity expert’ David Shipley, who is adamant that the Russians are behind everything.
Shipley proclaimed “Who would have reason right now to cause as much chaos in Canada as possible? Well, at the top of that list is Russia.”
He continued, “We are actively engaged in a geopolitical battle about the future of the Ukraine. Our Foreign Affairs minister, our Prime Minister, others have been very vocal in our support for the Ukraine and it seems very likely that the tactics that we are seeing, the creation of the massive Facebook groups using fake identities or in the case now alleged by a U.S. media outlet, a stolen identity of a Missouri woman to create these groups and to foster this communication hundreds of thousands of people, this is the Russian internet research agency playbook writ large.”
Shipley has considered that possibly the truckers are Chinese agents too, but ultimately no, they’re Russian.
He declared “You have other enemies as well. You have China, you have other states but when I narrow down my list of suspects and I don’t have enough evidence to win in a court of law but I don’t need that right now, this smacks of the kind of move that Russia has made in the past, the United States, and is continuing to do around the world.”
When asked what the solution to this pressing Russian agent problem is, Shipley’s solution was to restrict and shut down the convoy’s social media presence.
You certainly don’t have enough evidence Mr Shipley because there isn’t any.
OTTAWA – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms today filed a lawsuit in Federal Court seeking to strike down the federal government’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine requirements for air travellers. The court action is on behalf of several Canadians from across Canada whose Charter rights and freedoms have been infringed.
On October 30, 2021, the federal government announced that anyone travelling by air, train, or ship, must be fully vaccinated. The travel vaccination mandate has prevented approximately 6 million unvaccinated Canadians (15% of Canada’s population) from travel within Canada and prevents them from flying out of Canada. Some of the Canadians involved in the lawsuit cannot travel to help sick loved ones, get to work, visit family and friends, take international vacations, and live ordinary lives.
The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
“It is becoming more obvious that being vaccinated does not stop people from getting Covid and does not stop them from spreading it”, says the former Premier. “The government has not shown that the policy makes flying safer—it simply discriminates”, he notes. “When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country”, adds Mr. Peckford.
“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians. It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,” explains Mr. Peckford.
The Justice Centre’s legal challenge cites violations of Charter rights including mobility, life, liberty and security of the person, privacy, and discrimination. The lawsuit also challenges whether the Minister of Transportation has the jurisdiction to use aviation safety powers to enforce public health measures.
In discussing effective border control measures at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tam, said: “As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all… WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.” (Canada House of Commons, Standing Committee on Health Meeting, February 5, 2020)
The World Health Organization (“WHO”) continues to maintain that position and on January 19, 2022, urged all countries to: “Lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress experienced by States Parties. The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time.” The WHO repeated that countries should: “not require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for international travel.” (World Health Organization, Statement on the tenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, January 19, 2022.)
“Despite the confirmed science that the vaccine does not stop people from getting or spreading the virus and the repeated warnings from the WHO, it’s clear the federal government is out of step and arbitrarily restricting Canadians fundamental rights and freedoms,” says Keith Wilson, Q.C., lead counsel for the legal challenge. “It is profoundly disturbing that a marginalized group in Canada—the unvaccinated—are essentially prohibited from leaving the country,” he adds.
“Canadians have been losing hope in the Charter and our courts. We are going to put the best arguments and evidence forward so that the court can clarify where governments overstep,” concludes Mr. Wilson.
The court will be asked to hear the case on an expedited basis given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility and other rights. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has banned Covid vaccine-free travellers from air travel.
The ongoing Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.
But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again after the truckers go home. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”
Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé admits that vaccine passports and mandatory masks have no end in sight, and will remain “tools” to ensure a return to “normal life” when another wave hits. pic.twitter.com/TXJnN4xJ8x
In March of 2020, in violation of the principles embedded in our constitutions, governments around the world convinced citizens to give their leaders and public institutions the authority to overrule individual rights in order to “flatten the curve.” That impulse went unchallenged under the false assumption that human rights violations could be justified as long as the benefits to the majority outweighed the costs to the minority. By accepting this excuse for overriding unconditional rights, we transformed ourselves into an authoritarian police state where “might makes right”. That is the moment when all the checks and balances in our scientific and democratic institutions stopped functioning.
Liberal democracy was built around the principle that individual rights must be unconditional. In other words, they are meant to supersede the authority of government. Consequently, individual rights (such as bodily autonomy) were meant to serve as checks and balances on government power. They were meant to provide a hard limit to what our government can do to us without our individual consent.
If the government cannot override your rights to bend you to its will, then it will be forced to try to convince you by talking with you. That forces government to be transparent and to engage in meaningful debate with critics. Your ability to say NO, and to have your choice respected, is the difference between a functioning liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime.
The natural instinct of fearful people is to control those around them. Unconditional rights force people to negotiate voluntary participation in collective solutions. Thus, unconditional rights prevent the formation of echo chambers and provide an important counter-weight to rein in uncontrolled panic. When no-one has the option to use the brute force of State power to force others to submit to what they think is “the right thing to do”, then the only path forward is to keep talking to everyone, including to “fringe minorities” with “unacceptable views”. When we allow rights to become conditional, it is virtually a certainty that during a crisis, panicked citizens and opportunistic politicians will give in to their worst impulses and trample those who disagree with them.
Unconditional individual rights prevent governments from taking unwilling citizens on crusades. They prevent scientific institutions from transforming themselves into unchallengeable “Ministries of Truth” that can double down on their mistakes to avoid accountability. They ensure that the checks and balances that make science and democracy work do not break down in the chaos of a crisis. In the heat of an emergency when policy decisions are often made on the fly, unconditional rights are often the only safeguards to protect minorities from panicked mobs and self-anointed kings.
If we allow our leaders to normalize the idea that rights can be switched off during emergencies or when political leaders decide that “the science is settled”, then we are giving the government terrifying and unlimited power over us. It gives those who control the levers of power the authority to turn off access to your life. That turns the competition for power into a zero-sum game: the winners become masters, the losers become serfs. It means you can no longer afford to allow the other side to win an election, at any cost, nor agree to a peaceful transfer of power, because if you lose the winning team becomes the master of your destiny. And so, a zero-sum game of brutal power politics is set in motion. Unconditional individual rights are the antidote to civil war. Liberal democracy collapses without them.
Withdrawing mandates because “the Omicron variant is mild” or because “the costs of continuing the measures outweigh the benefits” does not undo what has been normalized and legitimized. If the legitimacy of mandates is not overturned, you will not be going back to your normal life. It may superficially look similar to your life before Covid, but in reality you will be living in a Brave New World where governments temporarily grant privileges to those who conform with the government’s vision of how we should live. You will no longer be celebrating your differences, cultivating your individuality, or making your own free choices. Only conformity will enable you to exist. You will be living under a regime in which any new “crisis” can serve as justification to impose restrictions on those who don’t “get with the program” as long as mobs and technocrats think the restrictions are “reasonable”. You will no longer be the master of your own life. A golden cage is still a cage if someone else controls the lock on the door.
Politicians and public health authorities MUST be forced to acknowledge that mandates are a violation of civil liberties. The public MUST be confronted by the fact that liberal democracy ceases to exist without the unconditional (inalienable) safeguards of individual rights and freedoms. The public MUST recognize that science ceases to function when mandates can be used to cut off scientific debates. Our governments and our fellow citizens MUST be made to understand that unconditional rights are especially important during a crisis.
If the legal and ethical fallacies that were used to justify mandates are not called out as inexcusable violations of our constitutional rights, we will have inadvertently normalized the illiberal idea that, as long as someone in a lab coat says it’s okay, this can be done to us again, at any time, whether to fight the next wave of Covid, to take away freedoms to fight “climate change”, to seize assets to solve a government debt crisis, or simply to socially engineer outcomes according to whatever our leaders define as a “fairer and more equitable world”.
How we navigate the end of mandates determines whether we win our freedom or whether we allow our leaders to normalize a Brave New World with conditional rights that can be turned off again during the next “emergency”.
By Kit Klarenberg | Mint Press News | January 28, 2025
Ever since Tel Aviv’s 1948 creation, much has been said and written about ‘Greater Israel’ – the notion Zionism’s ultimate end goal is the forcible annexation and ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of Arab and Muslim lands for Jewish settlement, based on Biblical claims this territory was promised to Jews by God. The mainstream media typically dismisses this concept as antisemitic conspiracy theory, or at most the fringe fantasy of a minuscule handful of extremist Israelis.
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The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
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