He that Hath No Sword, Let Him Sell His Garment and Buy One

Here in the Dominion of Canada, we are now in the eighth year of the federal premiership of Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau to use the unkind slur by which he is often called.   He came to power in the Dominion election of 2015 with a majority win for the Liberals and has managed to cling to power ever since with slim pluralities.  Despite, however, the fact that he has been in a position of minority government since 2019, he continues to govern like he has a clear, blank-cheque of a mandate, to do whatever he wants, no matter how unjust and divisive his various agendas turn out to be.

 

Take Bill C-21.   Please, take it.   This bill was tabled (1) early last year and had finished going through its first two readings around the beginning of summer in June.   The bill is the product of all the hot air that has been coming from the Liberal government since the multiple shooting incident in Nova Scotia in April of 2020.   Shortly after the attacks, Captain Airhead announced on the Communist holiday that a ban by Order-in-Counsel would take effect immediately on what he called “assault-style” weapons.    This was all a lot of smoke and mirrors.  Actual assault weapons of the kind that match the way the Prime Minister keeps describing them, i.e., weapons designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a period of time, were already illegal in Canada and had been long before the Nova Scotia shootings.   The “assault-style weapons” that he was going after were merely non-military grade rifles that had been made to look like military rifles for those to whom such an appearance had an aesthetic appeal.    Captain Airhead then began shooting his mouth off for the last three years about the need to make our streets safe from gun crime, even as he introduced or stuck to policies on everything from border control to mind-altering drugs to bail reform that had the opposite effect.   Bill C-21 if passed would amend various Acts of Parliament to enshrine a much broader gun ban than the one of 2020 into statutory law.   It would do absolutely nothing about making our streets safe from gun crime because these crimes are overwhelmingly committed with guns that are illegally obtained – as were the guns in the Nova Scotia shootings, incidentally – because they are already illegal.    None of these acts of the Trudeau Liberals, from the Order-in-Council of 1 May, 2020 to Bill C-21, have had or will have much of an effect on making Canadians safer from crimes either of the Nova Scotia variety or of the kind that afflicts our inner cities.   Those who are most affected by such empty, self-righteous, gestures are law-abiding Canadians who own guns that they acquired legally and have only used legally.   Liberals like the Prime Minister, Bill Blair and Marco “the Mendacious” Mendicino think nothing about unjustly and unfairly punishing such people for the crimes of actual gun criminals against whom they are either unable or unwilling to act.

 

All the criticism of Bill C-21 and its drafters in the preceding paragraph applied to the bill even before it went into Committee consideration after the second reading in the House which is where it presently stands.   During the Committee stage, however, the Liberals amended it in a way that made it much worse.    The amendment, which was introduced very late in the year, the Liberals apparently hoping to squeak the amended bill through Committee and its third reading before the House adjourned for Christmas and relying upon the amendment having been introduced just prior to the anniversary of the  École Polytechnique massacre to shield the move from criticism, greatly expanded the list of guns to be banned.  While the Liberals continue to shout “misinformation” and “disinformation” at anyone, especially His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, when they point this out, it is quite reasonable to conclude from the amended list of guns to be banned that rural Canadians, especially farmers and hunters, are being targeted here.    There are guns on the list that are clearly hunting guns and which are in no way connected to gun crime in Canada.   A traditional shotgun made by English manufacturer Webley and Scott for hunting birds is one such example.   There are many others.  (2)    Indeed, if you were to draw up a list of the most common guns used by farmers and hunters, you would find that many of the most prominent guns on the list are included in the amended version of Bill C-21.  The Liberal Party under its current management loves to turn Canadians against each other, to reward those who vote Liberal, and rub the noses of those who do not vote Liberal in Liberal laws, but here this backfired against them.   At present, as a minority government, they are propped up by the socialist party, the New Democrats, who agreed to support them in Parliament until the next Dominion election.   It is not just the Conservatives, however, who have a large rural base but the NDP as well.   While the NDP is led by urban socialists, much of their caucus represent northern ridings where reservations in which hunting remains a huge part of the way of life are to be found.   When the Assembly held an emergency session in early December and condemned the Liberal bill as an assault on their way of life the NDP had no choice but to join the Conservatives in opposing the Bill in its currently amended form.   When this happened, even the few Liberals who represent rural ridings felt free to break ranks with the leadership of their own party over the issue.   Call it a Christmas miracle.

 

While initially when faced with such opposition the government gave signs of being willing to make concessions, when asked a few weeks later about this the Prime Minister indicated that they intended to pass Bill C-21 and doubled down on accusing the Conservatives of “misinformation” and “disinformation” for telling the truth about how the bill would adversely affect law-abiding rural Canadians without doing anything about actual gun crime.   How this shall unfold in this New Year remains to be seen.

 

Earlier last year Captain Airhead made a remark in an interview that is quite revealing about the attitude he brings to this issue.   Appearing on an American podcast (Pod Save the World) he defended his government’s gun control policies and contrasted American and Canadian culture saying:

 

and we have a culture where the difference is, guns can be used for hunting or for sport-shooting in Canada, and there are lots of gun owners, and they're mostly law-respecting and law abiding, but you can't use a gun for self-protection in Canada. That's not a right that you have in the constitution or anywhere else.

 

It would be interesting to know if he really believes this or if he was just shooting his mouth off without thinking.     It is, of course, nonsense.   Canadians do indeed have a constitutional and legal right of self-protection and when a right is explicitly spelled out as such in constitution and law the implicit corollary is the right to employ such means as the explicit right may require.   Trudeau may be under the mistaken impression that his father’s Charter is the Canadian constitution, a mistake about which I shall have more to say shortly, but even if we limit our discussion of the constitution to the Charter his statement would be wrong.   Section 7 of the Charter by spelling out Canadians right to security of the person, recognizes their right of self-protection.   Furthermore, the Firearms Act recognizes self-protection as a legitimate grounds for a firearms permit (Section 20) and the Criminal Code (Sections 34, 35) acknowledges the right to use force to protect one’s person and property. 

 

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, properly understood, of course, is not Canada’s constitution, but a part of Canada’s constitution that was added in 1982.   Even the British North America Act, which, contrary to what many mistakenly think was not repealed in 1982 but renamed (the Constitution Act, 1867), taken together with the Charter, is only part of our constitution.   In Canada, we have a constitution that is both written and unwritten, and the unwritten parts are the largest.   The Charter itself acknowledges that its enactment does not annul other rights and freedoms than those spelled out it in it, that Canadians had previously enjoyed as part of our constitutional heritage of Common Law and parliamentary monarchy.   The right to use firearms in self-protection was already part of that heritage before the American Revolution and was not invented by the United States.   The only thing distinctively American about the United States’ version of the idea of the right to use firearms in self-protection is the notion that the right is absolute.   That people have the basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and the necessary corollary right to protect the same, and consequently the right to the means to such protection was recognized by both the Tory (Sir William Blackstone) and Whig (John Locke) traditions before the latter gave birth to both the American Revolution and the Liberal Party, which, for all of Trudeau’s yap about American influence on Canada, has always been the party of Americanization.

 

There is a tendency in some Christian circles to misinterpret the teachings of Christ in way that is parallel to how Trudeau misinterprets the Canadian constitution and law.   These misguided brethren have the idea that not merely the use of guns but self-protection in general is forbidden believers by Jesus’ teachings (the Sermon on the Mount specifically), and example (He allowed Himself to be arrested, falsely accused, tortured, and crucified without resisting).  In an extreme form that is associated with the tradition of the far left radical wing of the continental Protestant Reformation this interpretation of Jesus’ teachings and example is taken to mean that Christians cannot serve as policemen, soldiers, or in any other office of the state that requires the use of force.

 

With regards to the Sermon on the Mount this misinterpretation arises from the basic error of failing to give due weight to Matthew 5:17-19 or to note how these verses apply to what immediately follows in the remainder of the chapter.   These verses are the warning not to think that Jesus had come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them.   They come before Jesus’ saying that one’s righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and His expansion upon what that entails with a series of six contrasts in which one variation or another of the words “ye have heard that it was said to them of old time” introduces a quotation from the Old Testament, and then Jesus introduces the other side of the contrast with “but I say to you”.   These latter words are ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν in the Greek.   δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν means “but I say to you” without the ἐγὼ and ἐγὼ like all other nominative case personal pronouns in Greek is only used for emphasis.   By emphasizing the first person pronoun in this way, in this sort of contrast, Jesus declares His Own authority in speaking to be on par with that of the Old Testament Scriptures.   This format could easily suggest to some minds that Jesus was telling His followers to disregard the Old Testament and listen to Him instead.   Verses 17 to 19 warn His hearers against taking His words in that manner. 

 

With regards to the first two contrasts, in which the Old Testament quotations are taken from the Decalogue, there is less need of such a warning since what follows the “but I say to you” intensifies the meaning of the quoted commandment.   The third and fourth contrasts, however, could easily be taken as contradicting the Old Testament commandments.    The quotations come from the civil portion of the Mosaic Law, the instructions with regards to divorce and swearing oaths.   Jesus tells His followers that anyone who divorces his wife except for the cause of fornication causes her and anyone who marries her to commit adultery, and tells them not to swear at all.   Verses 17 to 19 tell us that this is not to be taken as annulling the civil provisions of the Mosaic Law.   Therefore, when Jesus said “swear not at all” this had nothing to do with the courtroom, as those sects whose members won’t take the oath before testifying in court wrongly think, but with oaths in common conversation.   Swearing on a Bible to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” does not violate Jesus’ instructions.   Saying “by gum” in casual conversation does.   (3)

 

The same principle applies to the last couplet of contrasts.   In the first of these, the Old Testament quotation is the Lex Talionis “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”.  In the second the quotation is the Second Greatest Commandment, to love your neighbour.   Note that in this final contrast, in addition to the Old Testament quotation there is added the words “and hate thine enemy”, a false extrapolation from the Old Testament commandment, and it is this false extrapolation to which Jesus speaks with His “but I say to you” which here directly contradicts the unscriptural add-on with the instruction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”.

 

It is Jesus’ “but I say to you” remarks in this last couplet of contrasts that is taken by some to mean that Christians are not allowed to protect themselves against violence.   What do verses 17 to 19 tell us about Jesus’ instructions to turn the other cheek?

 

The first thing to note, is that clearly verses 17 to 19 tell us that Jesus was not setting aside the Lex Talionis as the standard of criminal justice to be applied in a court of law.   Since that is the case, the extreme interpretation that says that Jesus’ followers are not serve as officers of law enforcement or any other state office the duties of which require the use of force is a twisting of the meaning of this passage.  

 

The second thing to note is that just as clearly “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” cannot be speaking about protecting oneself against the violent attacks of others.  This is because the right of self-protection was established in the Mosaic Law.   Exodus 22 is the operative passage.   If somebody breaks into another person’s house in the middle of the night, that person – the homeowner not the burglar – is not guilty of a crime if he uses lethal force against the housebreaker.   It was a limited right – it lasted only to daybreak after which the homeowner would be guilty, presumably because other options than lethal force would then be available – rather than an absolute right, but it is there and therefore,  we can conclude from Matthew 5:17-19, that the instruction to turn the other cheek does not forbid such self-protection.    Indeed, this should be apparent from Jesus’ very words.   The verb translated “smite” is ῥαπίζω and while this word did originally mean “strike with a stick” – it is derived from a noun meaning “stick” or “rod” – or “cudgel” or “thrash”, it later came to be used as shorthand for the phrase ἐπὶ κόρρης πατάξαι which more or less means “knock upside the head” and in writings contemporaneous with the New Testament generally means a “slap in the face”.   This is what it means here in the Gospel where the right cheek is specifically mentioned.   This particular combination refers not to an attack on the security of one’s person, but to an insult, the kind of insult that affronts one’s honour and challenges one to a duel.  To accept that challenge is to take a situation in which a confrontation has been building up in words and escalate it into violence, potentially lethal violence.   The response prescribed by Jesus, however, is one that would defuse such a powder keg.   It is quite perverse, therefore, to take Jesus’ words here as forbidding you from taking measures to protect yourself in situations that are already violent.

 

This brings us to Jesus’ Own example.   There are a number of important observations to be made.   The first of these is that Jesus clearly did not believe that the use of force is never called for in any situation.   Had He thought that way He would not have overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove the merchants out of the Temple.   The second, is that prior to His meekly submitting to arrest He commanded His disciples to procure for themselves the means of self-protection by selling their clothes if necessary (Luke 22:36, from which the title of this essay is taken).   The third is that His submission to being arrested, falsely charged, falsely convicted, tortured, and crucified was necessary because it was through these events that He fulfilled the purpose for which He came into this world in the first place, to offer Himself up as the propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.  

 

Related to this last observation is one that can be made about Jesus’ early followers, both in the New Testament and in the early centuries of post-New Testament Christian history.   While it is true that the early Christians submitted to being tortured, imprisoned, and killed for Jesus’ sake, the most important words here are “for Jesus’ sake”.   Jesus had warned His followers at various times, such as in the Olivet Discourse and in the earlier original commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (and later the Seventy), that thy would be persecuted in this manner because of His name and told them that they would be blessed and rewarded for this.   The early Christians rejoiced at the opportunity to suffer for Christ in this way.   All of this, however, had to do with their being treated in this way because they were Christians, because they publicly confessed and proclaimed Christ.   If a disciple were walking down a street in ancient Corinth and were pulled into an alley and beaten and robbed of everything he had on him and left to die, not because he was a Christian but because the robber who neither knew nor cared what his religious beliefs were wanted some quick cash, this did not make a martyr out of that disciple.   When the early Christians qua Christians, were persecuted, tortured, and killed in the name of the Christ they confessed, by submitting to such treatment they bore witness to that Christ, and by doing so persuaded many others of the truth of their faith.   Just as good came out of the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, in that His death paid for the sins of the world and made salvation available to all, so good came out of the martyrdom of His followers which contributed to the spread of the Gospel throughout the ancient world.   The willingness of the early Christians to submit to martyrdom or rather to embrace it – St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, is said to have yearned for martyrdom his entire Christian life and mourned when he survived earlier persecutions than the one in which he finally attained it – should not therefore be taken as evidence that they thought they needed to submit without resisting to any and every act of violence.   While the death of Jesus Christ accomplished the salvation of the world and the martyrdom of the early Christians helped the Gospel to spread like wildfire, most types of violent deaths – robbing someone for his wallet, murdering someone in a fit of rage, the cold-blooded assassination of your business or political rivals, killing someone in a drunken or drug-induced brawl, etc. – accomplish no such good.   To submit to such acts can indeed do evil to others.   If you give in to the demands of a bully, for example, he will generally not be satisfied and leave you alone, but will continue to bully you more and demand more of you, and will be emboldened to bully others, until someone stands up to him.   This applies to other forms of violent aggression as well.   Those who erroneously think that the teachings and example of Jesus and His early followers tell us that we ought to submit in non-resistance to every sort of violent crime are telling us that we should be content to allow our neighbours to suffer from society being overrun by violent crime.   That is an odd way of loving one’s neighbour.  The Second Greatest Commandment, of course, is to “love thy neighbour as thyself”.   If someone’s idea of loving himself is that he should allow everyone and everything to walk all over him, submit to every sort of affront to his human dignity, and let every imaginable sort of violent crime be perpetrated against himself, I would not place much stock in his love for his neighbour.

 

 (1)   This terminology might confuse readers from the United States if they are not aware of the difference between their usage and ours. In the Commonwealth to “table” a bill means to introduce it in parliament for consideration, i.e., to “put it on the table”.   In American parlance it has the opposite meaning, to remove a bill from consideration, or to “take it off the table”.

(2)   Amusingly, one gun which somehow made it onto the Liberals’ list of guns to be banned is something called the “Butt Master”.   This gun is pretty much the exact opposite of a gun designed to kill as many people as fast as possible.   It is a single use gun in the shape of a pen that has to be re-loaded each time it is fired.  Moreover, there has only ever been one of these in existence, the one still owned by its designer, Mark Serbu of Tampa, Florida.  

(3)  This is, of course, where the word “swearing” in the negative sense of the term comes from.   Originally, “swearing” in the negative sense meant the use of oaths outside of a courtroom.   Some older Canadians may still remember a time when they would be reprimanded for swearing for saying any of the various sorts of “by this or that” casual oaths.   Ironically, as the word came to take on the generic meaning of “language you shouldn’t use” so as to include cursing, which Scripture is also against, and barnyard or gutter slang about which the Scripture is silent, the sorts of phrases it originally and literally described, dropped out of what most people think when they hear the word.

Whips and Scorpions - Captain Airhead’s St. Valentine’s Day Manic Meltdown

 

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.