In the 2015 Dominion election Captain Airhead, the son of
the man who up to that point had been the worst Prime Minister in the history
of Canada, was swept into the Prime Minister’s office by a second wave of
Trudeaumania, much worse than the first, and he has remained in that office
ever since, despite scandal after scandal and a combination of gross
incompetency with massive egotistical arrogance that resembles a dark,
sinister, unfunny version of the kind we associate with characters portrayed by
Peter Sellers in the movies.. He was
whittled down to a plurality of seats in 2019, which he just managed to retain
in 2021, but with help, sometimes from the socialists, sometimes from the
separatists, he has managed to cling to office. In his hubris, which puts even that of his
father to shame, he has continued to govern as if he had the mandate of a
majority government – even a supermajority – in the House behind him.
Captain Airhead has always seemed to be more concerned about
the image he projects than anything else, including the good of the country
whose government he leads. The groups
he has most often sought to impress have been the young and the woke – his
domestic support base – and the “international community”. His efforts have at times failed in ways
that rendered him – and Canada – a laughing stock. Earlier this year we were given yet another
example of this. When the rest of the
world was finally coming around and deciding to treat the bat flu like the
normal flu and lifting restrictions and mandates, he, who had been scapegoating
the unvaccinated for all the country’s problems since last summer, decided to
double down instead and removed the vaccine mandate exemption for long haul
truck drivers crossing the border from the United States. This led truckers, vaccinated and
unvaccinated, from all across the Dominion to head towards Ottawa in one big
protest convoy. As they approached, he
hurled insults at them and then, as they began to pour into the capital, he
fled to an “undisclosed secure location”, citing a conveniently timed need to
self-isolate due to exposure to the bat flu.
This earned him the scorn and derision of his opponents and allies, at
home and abroad, alike. The image he
was clearly projecting for all to see was that of a sniveling coward.
The trucker protest has been ongoing since, both in Ottawa
and other major Canadian cities.
Captain Airhead, in an address to the nation from his hiding place on
the Monday after the convoy arrived in Ottawa doubled down on his insulting language
and his arrogant tone but despite his efforts and those of his sycophants in
the media to portray the trucker protest as a small group of astroturfed racist
ideologues it was apparent to everybody watching that unlike the protests he
himself supports – anti-pipeline and anti-petroleum environmentalist protests,
Black Lives Matter, etc., which typically consist of professional protesters
funded by far left billionaires like George Soros – this was a genuine,
grassroots, working and middle class protest.
It differed from the kind of protest Captain Airhead admires
in one other way. Whereas Black Lives
Matter rallies broke out into riots, vandalism and looting in major cities all
across North America and last year’s demonstrations arising out of wild and
irresponsible allegations against the former Indian Residential Schools led to
the arson and other vandalism over well over fifty churches and the toppling
and decapitation of statues, the truckers’ protest has been an actual peaceful
protest rather than an anarchistic riot declared to be peaceful by media
fiat. While loud and noisy, it has not
been violent and destructive and, indeed, would be best described as the
world’s largest and longest block party.
Where some of the spin-off protests have arguably crossed the line from expressing
their legitimate complaints about the infringement of their own rights and
freedoms into interfering with those of others has been the impediment of
traffic across the border with the US at important commercial crossings such as
the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Emerson here in Manitoba, and Coutts in
Alberta. Many have noted, however, and
rightly so, that those condemning the freedom protestors on these grounds had
no objection to the entire border being closed by the government to anything
but supply-chain commercial transport for almost two years nor have they ever
insisted that the government do anything when groups of Indians – in many cases
paid environmentalist protestors claiming to be Indians would probably be more
accurate - have blockaded commercial infrastructure such as highways or
railroads to back up some demand or another of theirs.
Over the past couple of weeks most Canadians when asked,
regardless of what they thought of pandemic measures or the truckers’ protest
itself, agreed that Captain Airhead’s attitude and behaviour were only making
things worse. In the midst of calls
from everyone except the most bootlicking of his supporters to deescalate the
situation he seemed determined to do the exact opposite.
On Monday, the fourteenth of February, Captain Airhead
decided to do just that and to send a Valentine to those questioning and
challenging his heavy-handed pandemic policies in the form of the invocation of
the Emergency Measures Act. Technically
this is the first time this act has been used, although it was introduced in
the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988, not as a first-of-its-kind piece of
legislation, but as an update and replacement for the War Measures Act. Captain Airhead’s own father had been the
last to invoke the War Measures Act – and the only Prime Minister to do so in
peacetime. Indeed, the thought that was
almost certainly foremost in Captain Airhead’s mind as he decided to do this
was that he could dispel the image of a coward he had crafted for himself by conjuring
up that of his father’s handling of the October Crisis.
He has succeeded, however, only in presenting the image of a
weak man trying to appear strong, of a little man – or potato, to borrow
China’s favourite contemptuous epithet for him - trying to appear big. The contrasts with his father are far
greater than the similarities.
In 1970 Pierre Trudeau was dealing with a militant Quebec
separatist organization that had been committing acts of terrorism against
Canada since the early ‘60s. These had been
increasing in intensity. The previous
year they had bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring several people and
causing a million dollars’ worth of damage.
In the crisis in which Trudeau acted the FLQ had kidnapped the British
Trade Commissioner James Cross and then kidnapped and murdered the Labour
Minister of Quebec – he was also deputy premier of the province – Pierre
Laporte. This was a situation that
called for a display of government strength although Pierre Trudeau was
criticized then and afterwards – justly in my opinion – for taking this to an
unnecessary extreme.
By contrast, the people over whom Captain Airhead is
throwing a tantrum have not blown anything up, kidnapped anyone, murdered
anyone, or done anything remotely similar.
They have parked their trucks in the vicinity of Parliament – and several
provincial legislatures – with the declared intention of not leaving until
their demands are met. Those demands,
unlike the separatist demands of the FLQ, are entirely reasonable. They are demanding that the government
return to them – and to all Canadians – the basic freedoms that belong to them,
that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect, but
which the government has treated as if they were its own to give and take away
as it sees fit for the duration of the bat flu pandemic of the last two
years. Since these reasonable demands
translate into a reasonable objection to government overreach, piling more
government overreach on top – indeed, the maximum overreach available to the
government – after two weeks of doing nothing but insult the protestors, can
only be seen as an irresponsible and incendiary response.
It is not his father, Captain Airhead has come across as
resembling, so much as Rehoboam, the son and heir of King Solomon. At his coronation at Shechem as recorded in
the twelfth chapter of I Kings, Rehoboam received a delegation of Israelites
headed by Jeroboam which asked him to lighten the yoke his father had laid upon
them. He asked them to come back in
three days for an answer, then consulted with the wise elders of Israel, who
advised him to grant the request. Then
he asked the advice of the hot-headed youth of his own generation. They told him to make the yoke heavier
instead of lighter. Rehoboam discarded the advice of the wise
elders, and heeded instead the reckless advice of the fools he had grown up
with and told the delegation “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to
your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you
with scorpions.” This went down as one
of the most boneheaded moves in all the history of Old Testament Israel. By behaving this way Rehoboam provoked all
the tribes of Israel except his own tribe, Judah, and Benjamin into rebelling
against the Davidic dynasty and split the formerly united kingdom of Israel
into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.
Captain Airhead’s similar response to the freedom protestors is unlikely
to be looked upon any more favourably than Rehoboam’s in generations yet to
come.
This situation in no way meets the stringent requirements
written into the Emergency Measures Act for its invocation. The protests do not “seriously endanger the
lives, health or safety” of Canadians nor do they “exceed the capacity or
authority of a province to deal with it” as ought to evident from the facts
that even as Captain Airhead was preparing to make his announcement the
Ambassador Bridge and Coutts border blockages were being cleared by ordinary
police action and the provincial premiers – with the exception of the dolt in
charge of Upper Canada – were all telling him to take a chill pill, they could
handle the situation, the EMA was neither necessary nor wanted. Captain Airhead most likely believes that
none of this matters, that with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s New Democrats
he will be able to ram approval of the EMA through the House of Commons and get
the Senate to rubber stamp it while the courts, if they act at all to hold the
government accountable rather than merely defer to the government, will act too
late to stop him.
The speech in which Captain Airhead announced this step was
his most brazen one to date. How he
managed to keep a straight face while saying that this was not something a
Prime Minister should do lightly, that it is not the first step, nor the second
step, but the last step that should be considered, is beyond me. Perhaps he is a better actor than I had
given him credit for. Michelle Ferreri,
the Conservative MP for Peterborough-Kawartha put the question to the
government in Question Period on Tuesday of what other steps had been tried
first. The “answer” from Emergency
Preparedness Minister Bill Blair sidestepped the question. Obviously, the government did not exhaust
all other means available to it before taking this step. It did not, for example, try talking to the
protestors, hearing their complaints, and negotiating. Indeed, the only other “step” it appears to
have taken has been to hurl insults, lies, threats, condescension and other
abuse at the protestors.
It was also mighty rich of Captain Airhead to smugly and
self-righteously pat himself on the back and justify this unjustifiable power
grab by saying that the people of Ottawa deserve to have their lives back. That all Canadians deserve to have their
lives back is, of course, precisely the point of the truckers’ protest. The truckers’ protest has been going for
about a month. To whatever extent it
can be said to interfere with the daily lives of the people of Ottawa that
interference is insignificant in comparison with how requiring businesses to
operate at a fraction of their capacity, closing churches and other places of
worship, telling people that they cannot have friends over or meet with people
outside of their own household other than through the internet, ordering people
to wear masks everywhere, and forcing them to take a foreign substance into
their bodies against their will by taking everything away from them until they “consent”
has affected the daily lives of all Canadians.
Since Captain Airhead, for all of his talk about providing
local law enforcement with the “tools” necessary to end the protests, does not
seem to be interested in sending the military in to support local law
enforcement – credible reports, prior to the invoking of the Emergency Measures
Act, indicated that he had already asked the military to intervene and had been
told, essentially, to “truck off” – it is obvious that it is the extra financial
powers spelled out by Chrystia Freeland after his announcement that he is
after. This should come as a surprise
to nobody. Even though Freeland,
Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, has only been in the Ministry of
Finance since Bill Morneau was forced to fall on the sword to save Captain
Airhead in the WE Charity scandal of 2020, she and the Prime Minister have been
seeking to take control over their finances out of Canadians’ hands since they
came to power a little over six years ago.
As smug and arrogant as her boss, on Monday she announced that under the
Emergency Act the Canadian government would be requiring crowdfunding platforms
and their payment providers to register with FINTRAC and report large and “suspicious”
transactions, somehow regulating cryptocurrency, telling banks and other financial
institutions to review the transactions of their accountholders, giving those
institutions the power to freeze the accounts of convoy supporters without a
court order and protecting them against civil liability for doing so. In other words, she and the Prime Minister
gave themselves the power to utterly destroy dissenters by seizing their assets
without due process and leaving them no legal recourse. For the record, I, like all sane people, am
opposed to government ever having this kind of power under any
circumstances. Not even in a real
emergency – which this is not. Not even
to combat real terrorists rather than non-violent protestors. A government that has this kind of power is
not a government limited by constitution.
Nota bene, Freeland also said that the government would be introducing
legislation aimed at making its new financial powers permanent. This shows the utter hollowness of the
government’s assurances that their actions under the EMA would be subject to
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
On Wednesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino,
presented the House with the motion that would confirm the Emergency Measures
Act. Let us hope and pray that there
are many Liberal MPs chafing to get out from under Captain Airhead’s whip. Let us hope and pray that there are NDP
members left who can recognize that it would be a betrayal of an important
legacy of their party which in 1970, led by the legendary Tommy Douglas, had
the distinction of being the only party in Parliament to take a just stand
against Pierre Trudeau’s peacetime use of the War Measures Act against actual
terrorists, to follow Jimmy Dhaliwal in using martial law to crush a protest by
the working class their party once claimed to stand for. Let us hope and pray that there are enough
of both who will stand with the Conservatives and the Bloc in refusing to
confirm the EMA so as to send the message to Captain Airhead and his goons that
their assaults on constitutional government and personal freedom will be
tolerated by Parliament no longer and that they can take their whips and
scorpions and stick them where the sun don’t shine.
Alas...
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