RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The left vs the people -- The truckers’ protests have exposed liberals as authoritarians and leftists as enemies of the working class  Sun Feb 20, 2022 5:40 pm | |
| It’s been quite a few weeks for our neighbours to the north. Three weeks ago, a ragtag, grassroots campaign of disgruntled truckers made their way to the Canadian capital to protest a government vaccine mandate. As of last night, two of the organisers of what has been, by all accounts, a peaceful protest have been arrested, giving Canada – a country that bills itself a democracy – its first political prisoners in recent memory.
On Thursday, Chris Barber was arrested, while Tamara Lich had her personal bank account frozen and was detained on a charge of ‘aiding and abetting mischief’ – a trumped-up charge resulting directly from a naked power grab by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Instead of meeting with his citizens to hear their demands, Trudeau has spent the past three weeks smearing them as hateful and violent. On Monday he became the first Canadian leader to invoke the Emergencies Act – giving his government a series of draconian powers. Without one iota of evidence that the ‘violence’ of the truckers’ protests has ever exceeded honking, Trudeau broadened the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing rules, putting the striking truckers on a par with terrorists, suspending their civil liberties and allowing banks to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked to them. Now Trudeau is having them arrested. And on Friday morning, he cancelled a parliamentary session in which his edict was due to be voted on, and could have potentially been revoked, by the House of Commons or the Senate.
The truckers’ protest began with Trudeau smearing the truckers as Nazis and fascists – a line gladly repeated, day in day out, by reporters and pundits in the elite liberal media. It is now ending with those same elites cheering on Trudeau’s authoritarianism.
Although the media have promoted Trudeau’s falsehoods and cheered his overreach, many Canadians see the protests for what they are. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is taking the federal government to court for invoking the Emergencies Act. ‘It’s possible for protests to be both disruptive and peaceful’, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, its executive director, rightly argued. Others have pointed out Trudeau’s hypocrisy. In 2020 the Canadian PM threw his support behind both Black Lives Matter’s disruptive protests and protesting farmers in India who were blocking major highways. ‘Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest’, Trudeau said back then.
How things have changed. Instead of defending the right of peaceful protest, Trudeau has tarred it as terrorism and has seized the personal bank accounts of his political adversaries.
It’s a terrifying development for a country that calls itself a democracy to use such excessive means to quash dissent. Even going by Canada’s own laws, Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act is surely unconstitutional, as it requires a ‘national emergency’ so serious that it cannot be resolved by any other means. Trudeau has not met with the truckers even once to attempt to defuse the situation, so how could he possibly know that he couldn’t resolve the emergency any other way?
.https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/18/the-left-vs-the-people/?fbclid=IwAR1FXL5fcfgGpusR5zFd6qjrw2fWmHuP_npNua1zOzlVTXofyhfksadU2Nw |
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