Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has imposed a state of emergency in the country and abolished some of the civil rights of Canadians: for example, their right to donate their money to whom they want to donate
With this action, Trudeau has cemented his reputation as a cowardly and hypocritical politician who is terribly unhappy with his great family name.
Just over half a century ago, in October 1970, the father of the current Canadian Prime Minister and also Prime Minister Pierre-Eliot Trudeau abolished democracy in his country, essentially imposing martial law in peacetime. People were seized and thrown behind bars without trial, and among these people were famous cultural figures, including Gaston Miron, the national poet of Quebec.
In fact, it was separatism in Quebec that started it all. For a decade the French-speaking, overpopulated, poor, mainly agricultural province went through a period of national rebirth, seething with hatred of Anglophiles, the Vatican and the central government all at once.
The reasons for this were a wagonload. For years, the province’s economic power belonged to the Anglophile minority, which deliberately held back Quebec’s industrial development, while the Catholic Church actively supported this semi-feudal form of life.
The grievances of Quebecers can be told at length, but this story is not about them or that Pierre-Eliot Trudeau is the executioner of the Quebec people. Quite the contrary, in Canada he is no less than the father of the nation – the most respected man in the country’s history, who ended a period of gangster capitalism, built a welfare state and did much to equalise opportunities for the Anglophone and Francophone communities.
In his youth he himself supported the Quebec separatists and their strikes and later when he switched to the Unionist-Federalists he became the man who solved the Quebec crisis: The pro-independence supporters were allowed to hold a referendum on separation from Canada, which they lost thanks to the then very popular Trudeau.
The temporary abolition of democracy in 1970 (temporary, in fact; the state of emergency was relaxed in December and lifted altogether in April) is one reason for his popularity. Whether you sympathise with Quebecers or not, the left-wing Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was a classic terrorist organisation – the kind that robbed banks, caused explosions and took hostages.
Trudeau went to extreme measures – introducing troops into Quebec and mass arrests for a fortnight to a month – after FDC operatives kidnapped British trade representative in Montreal James Cross and the provincial government’s deputy prime minister, Pierre Laporte. After two weeks of searching, the body of a strangled Laporte was found in the boot of a car.
All in all, Trudeau is not a tyrant in this story, but a hero. Now, when current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives in Montreal, his flight lands at the airport named after his father. And he probably convinces himself that by imposing a state of emergency in the country, he is following in his great parent’s footsteps.
It’s not quite the same regime as under Dad, but softer – since then, Canada has managed to pass a new emergency law. But there is nothing tougher in the legislation, which means that the government has “tightened the screws” as much as possible.
The reason is the protests of truckers. The ban on crossing the US-Canadian border for the unvaccinated has spawned a strike demanding that all anti-vaccine restrictions be lifted. After Trudeau called the protesters a marginal group, the strike turned into a protest against the prime minister personally. Now several thousand people, who have travelled halfway across the country in a convoy, are blockading downtown metropolitan Ottawa and have no intention of going anywhere.
“Blockades are hurting our economy and endangering public safety. We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous actions to continue,” the prime minister said, justifying the imposition of a state of emergency.
For her part, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland introduced mandatory certification for all fundraising programs and promised to block, without a court of law, accounts from which protesters would transfer money.
Let’s not be dramatic: in Trudeau’s shoes, many would have done the same, or nearly so, if you remember all the inputs. Yes, it is a peaceful protest, but it is open-ended and periodically blocks the country’s most important transport arteries. And up to half of the funds to support the protesters come from abroad, essentially to overthrow the legitimate government.
In Canada’s case, the donor is its neighbours, the Americans. Former US President Donald Trump, still the country’s most popular conservative, thundered his support for the truckers, provoking a new wave of crowdfunding in their favour.
In short, there are few places where a trucker with a tire iron and signs of a foreign agent would be stroked on his beard, but Trudeau’s act has another important dimension. And one can only hope that the son has the tact not to equate his politics with that of a prominent father.
Because Trudeau Sr. had no choice – he did stand up to terrorists and scumbags when he sacrificed the civil rights of Canadians.
And Trudeau Jr had a choice; the protesters’ demands were by no means seemingly unworkable or even radical. Countries where vaccination rates are high have one after another lifted anti-vaccine restrictions, starting, incidentally, with the UK, which has formally shared a (common) head of state with Canada.
The number of vaccinated in Canada has reached 90%, but for Trudeau it was easier to abolish democracy than to give in to those people whom he called “marginalised” and the liberal media dubbed “fascists”.
But the main thing that catches the eye is Trudeau’s hypocritical duplicity. Typical American Liberal hypocritical duplicity in both domestic and foreign policy (by the way, both Trudeau’s party is called the Liberal party).
The striking truckers and their sympathisers are not always glorious people, because they are quite different. Virtually any protest attracts its own radicals, freaks, vandals, fascists, urban madmen. Anyone at all, given that 3% of any human group are sociopaths.
This allows you to build the focus of the camera based on personal sympathies, portraying a motley crowd, whether you want them to be bent-up rednecks or fighters for equality and justice.
But in terms of the amount of violence and damage to the cities, the Canadian strike does not compare to, for example, the BLM protests. If someone tried to block BLM and “antifa” crowdfunding in a period of looting and arson, Trudeau would be the first to call him a fascist, and in Ottawa those days no looting or arson.
And here’s a foreign policy example. Indefinite camping, fund-raising, self-defence squads, marching kitchens – there were many places like Euromaidan. If the same Chrystia Freeland, who is now cutting off the strikers’ donations like oxygen, were heading the Canadian Foreign Ministry in 2014, she, a descendant of a Nazi collaborator, would hardly have the words to call what was happening in Kiev anything but a “peaceful protest for freedom and democracy”.
However, this is not about Freeland either. If you dig into Foreign Affairs Canada’s statements, you will find that the protest was peaceful not only in Ukraine but also in Kazakhstan and even in Syria, although I doubt anyone would argue that the Canadian truckers seem like very nice people compared to the Syrian Mujahideen. They make Trudeau look good too. Even Trudeau.
Canadians, of course, can see for themselves which government to choose and whose side to support, but the Trudeau brand is a brand with an international name, and the cumulative value of that brand is now falling.
When we talk about his father, we’re talking about a man who put his life on the line to ensure his people had more rights and opportunities, and allowed himself complete freedom of action in foreign policy – up to and including visiting Castro in Cuba and provoking suspicion of cryptocommunism from the CIA.
And the son, by putting a lockdown on the state of emergency, looks like a cowardly and hypocritical appendage to the Washington-centred obcom, even though he is now formally struggling with American influence over his country’s domestic politics.
To feel this difference is as easy as the difference between Syrian Islamists and Canadian truckers.
Dmitry Bavyrin, VZGLYAD