A fundamental principle of a just society is that even if the laws themselves are unjust, they apply to everyone equally. If they don’t, it’s a tyranny.
Here’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2020.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Ottawa on Friday.
Trudeau’s act of solidarity comes after he declined to comment earlier in the day about whether he would be attending the protest. Still, he arrived at Parliament Hill — home to Canada’s Parliament — wearing a black cloth mask Friday afternoon and surrounded by security guards, according to CNN affiliate CTVnews.
Trudeau did not speak at the event, though he clapped and nodded along with some of the other speakers, including a moment when a speaker asserted there is no middle ground on racism. At another point, he yelled “Amen” along with other protesters after a speaker discussed promoting love and justice.
Now, Trudeau has escalated the crackdown on civil rights by unleashing emergency powers against the trucker protest in Ottawa.
Trudeau insisted that the truckers don’t represent a peaceful protest. While I have issues with protesters blocking roads, no matter what cause they represent, you either treat everyone equally or you don’t.
There was zero practical justification for hauling out emergency powers to deal with what basically amounted to a giant sit-in, a tactic that has a long civil rights tradition behind it, let alone using language about insurrection, let alone seizing assets, and treating political opponents like terrorists.
That actually is tyranny and terror.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which unlike the ACLU is still a functional civil rights group, noted that, “The Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ & when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.’
The CCLA is well on the Left and spends a good deal of time crying racism, but it can still point out the obvious here.
This is not an emergency that requires the suspension of civil rights and democratic norms, it’s a vocal protest that the government finds threatening enough (not physically, but politically) that it’s resorting to criminalizing and suppressing it, not because it meets any objective standard, just a political one.
“It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law enforcement’s ability to effectively enforce the law,” Trudeau argued.
That’s often the case in Toronto, but no amount of crime and deaths has resulted in the imposition of emergency powers.
Toronto had the third deadliest year on record with 84 murders. How many people died during the Freedom Convoy?
Trudeau is literally reviving measures intended originally for a state of war to deal with political opponents in order to “restore confidence in our institutions”.
That’s what totalitarian regimes do. And that’s what Trudeau now represents.