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Events in Canada have captured our attention, and Americans need to understand why. Our interest in affairs in our northern neighbor is not just neighborly: what happened in Canada was in fact a template for the suppression of freedom right here in the United States.
Surprising as it is, the harbinger of the American future just might have unfolded – in frigid Ottawa.
Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the 1988 Emergencies Act for the suppression of the public protests that had been wracking Canada – and especially Canadian national government and border crossings – for the past several weeks. The protests, with their roots in COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the trucking sector, grew into a full-on populist rejection of Canadian-elite governance. The Canadian elites understand this clearly, and that’s why they moved to crush it.
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It's worth understanding just why Canada’s national leadership, helmed by Trudeau himself, reacted with horror to popular protest against unpopular policy. Some of it is rooted in Canadian political identity and history: Canada, as a state, has its inception in the rejection of American-style republicanism, and those old habits of managerial governance persist.
Much more of it is rooted in the Canadian elites’ full-on embrace of a transnational, upper-income, Davos-inflected ideology that might be called – to borrow a term – globalist. You saw it in the rhetoric deployed by Trudeau and his Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, as they said, repeatedly, that the protests were "making us poorer," and that they damaged Canada’s standing in the eyes of other nations.
There was considerably less rhetoric devoted to the perceptions of Canadians, on whose behalf the rulers presumably rule. What no doubt came across as a measured argument around boardroom tables occupied by advanced-degree holders was communicated to ordinary people – and not just in Canada – as a plea, backed by force, to get back to being compliant economic units. In this framework, the essential dignity of man, Canadian and otherwise, is subsumed – as is his freedom.
But, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has declared, "freedom" "has become common among far-right groups." This is one of the great calumnies perpetrated by the intersection of Canada’s elite interests, for whom the CBC and most major Canadian media is a willing handmaiden.
A protest movement demanding the right to simply be left alone is vilified as extremist and even violent.
A protest movement demanding the right to simply be left alone is vilified as extremist and even violent. "This is not a peaceful protest," intoned Trudeau, but neither he nor anyone else pointed toward actual violence perpetrated by the Canadian citizens’ movement. Blocking roads in Ottawa may have been disruptive and inconvenient – and indeed it was intended to be exactly that, it amounted to a mere fraction of the disruption caused by Canadian-elite COVID-19 panic across two years – but it was by no means violent.
Americans who endured the genuinely violent insurrectionary summer of 2020 may look upon the Canadian popular uprising with envy. It was very Canadian, which is to say it was downright polite.
The Emergencies Act invoked by the Canadian government is a successor to the preceding War Measures Act: as the name suggests, it potentially empowers the government with sweeping authority well beyond the bounds of peacetime, and including the use of the armed forces. Trudeau and his colleagues insisted they weren’t contemplating going that far, in an assertion that requires considerable credulity of the listener.
But the real question was why did they go that far. Several of the provincial premiers have made it known that they didn’t think the Act was necessary. There was also a rapid loosening of COVID-19 restrictions in recent days – including, crucially, in populous Ontario. Furthermore, the Canadian state at all levels had not come at all close to exhausting its full police powers versus the protesters. So why the need for a wartime-powers measure at all?
The answer has nothing to do with the satisfaction of the protesters’ demands, which was in fact slowly happening, even if not at the speed they prefer. It also had nothing to do with any threat of violence posed by the protesters. They were determined but peaceful, as the forcible clearance of the Detroit-Windsor bridge demonstrated. These were not violent radicals: they’re ordinary people who want their lives and freedoms back.
The answer – the reason for the perceived need for the Emergencies Act – had everything to do with Canadian elites’ horror, from Justin Trudeau to Chrystia Freeland to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at the prospect of mass politics, a people’s politics, in Canada. A citizenry that does not wish to be ruled does not need them, and they know it.
Recall that on the first day of the protesters’ entry into Ottawa, the prime minister’s reaction was to flee the city to an undisclosed location, as if he were a Ceausescu or a Yanukovich. Recall, too, that both he and every member of his government steadfastly refused to meet with any protesters. They are not fellow Canadians in their eyes. They are harbingers of a future in which Davos-man elites like them are neither needed nor respected. That’s why the protest must be crushed.
They are completely right about what the protests represent.
A democratic citizenry that asserts its sovereignty, and demonstrates its willingness to be peaceably ungovernable in the face of autocratic rule, is an existential threat to the livelihoods and positions of the likes of Trudeau, Freeland, and the whole apparatus.
In this light, Canada is at a turning point in its history. One path leads to more of the same, with bland mediocrities like Trudeau relying on war measures as needed to sweep aside signals of his own unpopularity.
The other path leads to a Canada where Canadians rule.
Why should Americans care about all this? There are a few reasons. One is our natural sympathy for anyone demanding liberty, anywhere in the world. We are a republic founded upon liberty’s principles, and we are glad to see other nations and other people demanding the same.
There are more concrete reasons we ought to care as well. Trudeau, Freeland and the Canadian media elites have been aggressively blaming Americans for stoking, funding and even inciting the Canadian revolt. Trudeau even asserted that Americans seeking to join the protesters were being intercepted at the border; and Freeland declared that crowdfunding platforms would be regulated under anti-terror laws, to prevent foreign money from sustaining the protest.
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This was all smokescreen. The truth is that every American, and every American dollar, could have exited Canada, and the protest would have continued. That’s because it was Canadian, not American. As an American patriot, I can understand and respect Canadians’ agency and ability to fight for their own rights. What a pity Canada’s own elites cannot do the same.
Finally, we ought to care because the Biden regime in Washington, D.C., along with every other leftist and progressive regime in the Western world, is watching events in Canada –and quietly encouraging the Canadian government to resort to maximalist measures.
The existential threat perceived in Canadian protesters is the same existential threat perceived in Americans defying progressive governance – whether it’s parents in Loudon County, Virginia, or Hispanic voters with the audacity to vote red.
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The elite panic in Ottawa is matched and raised by elite panic in D.C. and elsewhere. They know that the Canadian model of protest is very easily adaptable to nearly everywhere. That’s why you’re already seeing copycat movements in places like New Zealand and France, and that’s also why you’re seeing Washington, D.C., rebuilding its protective wall around the Capitol to protect the liberal elite from the people during Joe Biden’s upcoming State of the Union Address.
In a very real sense, for the first time since 1776, Canada isn’t looking south to see what its future holds, the fate of America may is being foreshadowed in the tumultuous Canadian north.
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