Western Standard
A total 208 accounts worth $3.8 million have been frozen under an Emergencies Act order, by official estimate.
The Liberals say their freezing of bank accounts of some Freedom Convoy supporters is justified because they are narrow and focused,” says Blacklock’s Reporter. But one Liberal-appointed senator, a former banker, complained the
Eight days ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau employed the never-before-used Emergencies Act to crackdown on peaceful protesters in Ottawa who were in Canada’s capital for nearly four weeks as part of a nationwide convoy movement in opposition to remaining COVID-19 restrictions.
The Act gives the government extraordinary powers to arrest demonstrators and seize assets, trucks, and bank accounts of those involved in anti-government protests.
The plan to distract from the Emergencies Act, first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter Monday morning, coincided with mainstream media skepticism of the Trudeau Liberals’ use of the Act.
The scheme involves a payment of $36,000 to a U.S. consultant S-3 Group LLC of Cortland, New York to “design a strategy” to promote Canada on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The firm must “enhance the public profile of the work done at the Embassy of Canada and consulates in various territories across the United States.”
S-3 Group LLC has its work cut out for them.
Nearly 300 peaceful protesters were arrested and two people were trampled on Friday night as riot control horses rode into a crowd of demonstrators, breaking the collarbone of a Mohawk elder who was using a walker.
At least two journalists — Alexa Lavoie and Guillaume Roy, both of Rebel News — were pepper-sprayed by police as the weeks-long protest was euthanized by the authorities.
Alexa was also shot at point-blank range by a riot control gun and struck three times with a baton by police Saturday morning. Her assault was caught in her livestream broadcast to Twitter and watched by hundreds of thousands of people.
Rebel News is helping Alexa sue the Ottawa police for her assault.
by Canadian Press
A spokeswoman for Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says in a statement that the province has not ruled out legal recourse over the Emergencies Act.
Liam Richards / The Canadian Press
Saskatchewan is considering a legal challenge of the federal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to try to end blockades in Ottawa protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions.
A spokeswoman for Premier Scott Moe says in a statement that the province has not ruled out legal recourse. . . .
The Saskatchewan Party government says it is evaluating what effects the Emergencies Act could have in the province.
Moe has been opposed to the law since provincial leaders were consulted about it last week.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has said his United Conservative government will file a court challenge of the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act.
“The Government of Saskatchewan shares the position of other provinces that the criteria to enact the federal Emergencies Act has not been met,” Julie Leggott, press secretary to Moe, said in the statement.
“Saskatchewan is carefully evaluating the impact of the unilateral invocation of the Emergencies Act, despite the province’s clear opposition to its application in Saskatchewan during consultation.
“At this time, legal recourse is under consideration and has not been ruled out.”
TWO REPORTS, AUSTRALIA & CANADA
1.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney tweeted Saturday the province will file a court challenge of the federal government’s Emergencies Act in the wake of convoy protests in Ottawa.
In the posted video, he said invoking the act is “an unnecessary and disproportionate measure that can violate civil liberties, invades provincial jurisdiction and creates a very dangerous precedent for the future.” . . .
Kenney added his government “may also intervene in support of other court challenges,” including those of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation. . . .
(Trudeau previously said the “scope of these measures will be time-limited, geographically targeted and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address,” noting it does not include calling in the military or overriding Charter rights.)
“Mobility of citizens
(b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”
King Charles ignored constitutional limits on his power and thereby ignited a civil war that cost him his life and put England under a military dictatorship for more than a decade. The profound constitutionalist John Selden reflected on this shortly after the king’s execution and before the eventual restoration of the constitution after Oliver Cromwell’s death:
There is no stretching of power; it is a good rule — eat within your stomach, act within your commission.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau certainly is acting like someone who has eaten more than his stomach can hold, as well as far exceeding his commission.
Brian Peckford, former premier of Newfoundland, certainly feels so and had begun taking action even before the truckers began their now-famous protests in Ottawa, at the Ambassador Bridge, and at other places throughout Canada.
Peckford was one of the authors of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s equivalent of the Bill of Rights, which was joined to the Canadian Constitution in 1982. He is the leading spokesman of a group filing suit in Canada against one of the many acts of constitutional overreach: the severe restrictions the Trudeau minority government imposed on travel.
The charter states in section 6:
Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.
Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right to move to and take up residence in any province…
The Canadian Constitution does provide ways that its Parliament or its provincial legislatures can specifically override this. Peckford argues, however, that no such niceties were observed and that therefore the regulations imposed are invalid, unconstitutional infringements of Canadians’ liberties.
Overreaching governments often respond by claiming that their unique knowledge and capabilities are sufficient justification for their actions. They seek not only ratification of their actions from those whose powers they have taken, but to establish a precedent — the constitution will no longer bind them from any exercise of power it deems appropriate and necessary.
The result of this is clear. The liberties guaranteed by a constitution are now subject to the government’s veto. Effectively, the subjects (no longer citizens) now have only such rights as the government chooses to allow them. This means that government is no longer by the consent of the governed. To the contrary: individual rights are by the consent of a government answerable only to its own conception of its power.
Peckford was one of the political elite, but one who was and is dedicated to the principles of Western democracy. He is forceful and eloquent; hear him out in a brilliant interview with the incandescent Jordan Peterson (start listening just shy of minute 11).
But as we have seen in the past few weeks, the peaceful protests against overreach and the trampling of liberties have burst out among the not-so-elite. Not the kings of the keyboards, not the members of the chattering class, but the people who make the country work, led by the truckers.
Something about this assertion of rights has offended Trudeau. His personality does not seem up to the task that he campaigned for and won. He looks like someone not quite adult, knowing it, and overcompensating. Watching him always gave the feeling of watching someone trying too hard to be someone other than he is.
That was when all he faced was the normal polite opposition offered in Canadian politics. Respect for the law comes naturally in a nation whose founders descended from United Empire Loyalists — those who maintained their allegiance to the British crown while America asserted its independence. Canadians achieved their own independence in a different, slower, more orderly and peaceful way, and all those qualities of peacefulness, order, and respect for law are part of the civilizational sparkle of the land of the loon and the maple leaf.
But the oppressive overreach of Trudeau’s COVID restrictions, far exceeding anything justified by the data and the science, went too far and continued too long to be mistaken by a large part of the regular working people of Canada as anything other than an assault on their rights and thus of their human dignity. They rose up peacefully, and, emulating Martin Luther King Jr.’s method of resisting unconstitutional restrictive laws, practiced non-violent civil disobedience in a way that awoke widespread support and international attention.
Trudeau began his version of respectful dialogue with his aggrieved subjects by labeling their views, without exception, as “unacceptable.” Of course, anyone, who opposes the Great Leader must be on the fringe, with no right to petition and be heard. In the prime minister’s own words, they are “very often misogynistic, racist, women-haters, science-deniers, the fringe.” He let that stand as his only characterization of the protesters. A promising invitation to a national dialogue.
Trudeau then disappeared from view, perhaps believing that the fundamental laws of reality had been so deeply breached by the protest that some natural cataclysm was in order. Perhaps the earth would open and swallow the protesters like it had swallowed up Korach and his crew of dissidents in the Bible.
As followers of Trudeau’s dad might have said — wow! Even Richard Nixon made his way out of the White House to speak to protesters and hear them out. Trudeau seems to fall short of Nixon — with all his paranoia and tics, a most modest measure to fall short of. Not content with the infringements of liberties he has already imposed, Trudeau doubled down and imposed emergency powers intended for times of war, insurrection, or an equivalent existential threat. He threatened seizure of the truckers’ livelihood, imprisonment, and barring them from their chosen work.
The posturing of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator is coming to mind. But Trudeau knows how to spin things when an unpleasant truth is starting to come out: he projects the fascist mindset he has embraced onto those who oppose him politically (see Hillary Clinton’s similar response to the Durham filing for another classic example of this). Not once does he speak of any of the protesters as anything other than swastika-bearing enemies of all that is good, utterly to be excluded from any meaningful political rights. His power, his actions state, is not at the service of the people; the people can be utterly excluded as he sees fit. All Nazis.
Trudeau took this a little further last week. On the floor during a session of the House of Commons, a Jewish Member of Parliament, Melissa Lantsman, a member of the Conservative opposition, sharply criticized Trudeau’s invocation of unprecedented emergency powers. The grim prime minister replied: “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas, they can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag.”
He was met with outraged shouts of “Shame!” Lantsman stood to take formal exception to Trudeau’s remarks as a breach of order and demanded an apology:
I am a strong Jewish woman and a member of this House and a descendant of Holocaust survivors and … it’s never been singled out, and I’ve never been made to feel less except for today, when the prime minister accused me of standing with swastikas. I think he owes me an apology. I’d like an apology and I think he owes an apology to all members of this House.
But Trudeau had already left the House. Why does anyone who is so completely right and who holds the highest power have to listen to criticism? They are the Nazis! He probably believes that he believes it — except that every act of petulance, contempt, and overreach shows him to be just a very small man who prefers power to responsibility.
He has eaten more than his belly can contain, Selden would say.
There are a lot of Canadians who will now have their say. A fresh wind is blowing from the north and it is reminding people all over the world of just how precious liberty is. The people will have their say and it can’t come too soon.
The G&M report below on the findings of the Ethics Commissioner, arose over the Trudeau vacations (three separate ones) on the Caribbean island owned by the Aga Khan.
From the G&M article (Note: the G&M reports how much was donated by us Canadians to one of the Aga Khan’s funds ($15 million). It names, but does not report “how much” went to another of the Aga Khan’s enterprises ($50 million, reported by Macleans). Macleans doesn’t report the $15 million.)
The Aga Khan is the founder of the Aga Khan Foundation Canada, which was registered to lobby the federal government at the time of the vacations. Discussions were also under way over a $15-million federal grant to the endowment fund of the Global Centre for Pluralism, also founded by the Aga Khan.
From Maclean’s article of the same time:
. . . Aga Khan Foundation Canada received almost $50 million in federal funding in 2016. Trudeau controls the purse strings. He did not recuse himself from business meetings.
By staying on the island—his family went three times—Trudeau violated four provisions of the conflict of interest act, accepting free holidays that “might reasonably be seen to have been given to influence Mr. Trudeau.”
I equate this to:
. . . Something I learned in the process of Diving into Dumpsters, of all things! The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation money is invested profitably. It’s status is such that it does not pay any taxes, anywhere, on the money it makes. Tax-exempt. They invested years ago in “Waste Management”, which includes the acquisition of land fills. Philosophy: own from top to bottom. Own the services that the public has to pay for. The public purse is a source of extraordinary wealth. The Aga Khan knows that.
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GLOBE&MAIL
This article was published more than 4 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with the Aga Khan on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on May 17, 2016. Federal ethics commissioner Mary Dawson has concluded that Trudeau violated conflict of interest rules when he vacationed last Christmas at the private Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan.Sean Kilpatrick/The Globe and Mail
The Ethics Commissioner has ruled that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke Canada’s ethics law over two all-expenses-paid family trips to the Bahamas, rejecting the assertion his host was a close friend and dismissing his rationale for accepting helicopter flights to the private island.
A long-awaited report from Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson released on Wednesday revealed that not only did Mr. Trudeau and his family vacation at the Aga Khan’s residence last Christmas, the Trudeaus travelled to the private island for another Christmas holiday in 2014. It also said Mr. Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, took a separate vacation there in March, 2016.
The Prime Minister’s Office said on Wednesday it did not publicly disclose Ms. Grégoire Trudeau’s trip of March, 2016, because it does not proactively release information on the travels of Mr. Trudeau’s family members.
Campbell Clark: Trudeau treated the conflict-of-interest rules with unbearable lightness
The report said Mr. Trudeau violated four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act regarding two of the family trips last year to Bells Cay. The private island is owned by the Aga Khan, the billionaire spiritual leader of the world’s Ismaili Muslims, whose organizations deal frequently with the federal government.
Only the two trips in 2016 were found to have violated ethics rules, given that Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals were not in government in 2014. Still, Ms. Dawson made it clear there was no justification for failing to consult her about accepting free return flights to the island on a private helicopter.
“There was nothing unusual, unforeseen or unavoidable about this trip,” she said.
Mr. Trudeau had maintained he broke no rules because public office holders are allowed to accept gifts from friends. But Ms. Dawson concluded the two men were not friends under the Conflict of Interest Act, having spoken only once in the 30 years before Mr. Trudeau became Liberal Leader.
It is the first time an Ethics Commissioner has found a sitting prime minister to have violated the act since it was passed in 2006. While there is no official sanction against the Prime Minister, the negative findings stand to affect public perceptions.
“I should have taken precautions and cleared my family vacation and dealings with the Aga Khan in advance,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters. “I’m sorry I didn’t, and in the future, I will be clearing all my family vacations with the commissioner’s office.”
The Prime Minister said he considered the Aga Khan a friend and had not expected it would be a problem for his family to take a free holiday at his home.
“The fact is, we work … let me just try to reorder, reorder the thoughts,” Mr. Trudeau said, before continuing. “We worked with the lobby – conflict of interest commissioner on a regular basis on a broad range of issues when the issues come up. On this issue of a family vacation with a personal friend, it wasn’t considered that there would be an issue there.”
The Aga Khan is the founder of the Aga Khan Foundation Canada, which was registered to lobby the federal government at the time of the vacations. Discussions were also under way over a $15-million federal grant to the endowment fund of the Global Centre for Pluralism, also founded by the Aga Khan.
“Because there was ongoing official business between the Government of Canada and the Aga Khan at the time each invitation was accepted, Mr. Trudeau, as Prime Minister, was in a position to be able to advance some of the matters of interest to the Aga Khan,” Ms. Dawson said.
Ms. Dawson began her investigation after the December, 2016, trip became controversial in January. Since then, Mr. Trudeau has said he did not to report the vacation to the ethics commissioner because the Aga Khan was a “personal family friend.”
However, Ms. Dawson pointed out any real relationship was between the Aga Khan and Mr. Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, came after Mr. Trudeau’s political rise.
In 1983, the report said, Pierre Trudeau and his children spent two weeks in the Greek Isles with the Aga Khan, his spouse and children.
“Justin Trudeau had no personal or private interactions with the Aga Khan and his family between 1983 and April 2013, when he became Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, except for his father’s funeral in 2000,” her report said. “Mr. Trudeau’s description of his own friendship with the Aga Khan suggests that it arose as a result of his position as the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and subsequently from his position as Prime Minister.”
Ms. Dawson said the Aga Khan was not on the island during the trip in March, 2016. While the Aga Khan was there in December, Mr. Trudeau had been told he might not be.
Still, Mr. Trudeau insisted throughout the investigation they had a close link.
“Justin Trudeau said that when he and the Aga Khan saw each other at his father’s funeral in 2000, they hugged and he felt an instant re-connection and an instant closeness. Mr. Trudeau said it was as if no time had passed,” the report said.
During his news conference, Mr. Trudeau said the commissioner’s findings have not swayed his views.
“She made a determination that he is not a family friend. I still consider him a family friend, but moving forward, even on people I consider to be family friends or friends, I will be proactively checking with the … commissioner on any personal travel and vacations,” Mr. Trudeau said.
The opposition attacked Mr. Trudeau as an out-of-touch elitist.
“The Liberals continue to believe that there is one set of rules for Liberals and their friends and another set of rules for everyone else,” said Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who filed an official complaint against the Prime Minister earlier this year.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh added: “Prime Minister Trudeau has broken the law. … We have a reality where if you are powerful and well-connected, the same rules don’t apply.”
According to the Aga Khan, the invitation to the Trudeaus to use Bells Cay was made in March, 2014. The report added that Ms. Grégoire Trudeau contacted the Aga Khan’s daughter to organize the two trips in 2016, and asked whether she could invite friends. Ms. Grégoire Trudeau used a seaplane, chartered by staff at Bells Cay, to get to the island during the first 2016 trip.
Mr. Trudeau said he believed using a private helicopter to get to the island was justified because of “exceptional circumstances created by the isolation of the destination, the Prime Minister’s security requirements, and the impracticality and unavailability of Canadian or Bahamian government aircraft.”
Ms. Dawson said that a guidance document the Prime Minister sent to ministers in 2015 stated they could not accept free trips without approval from the Ethics Commissioner.
“In this case, the Prime Minister did not follow his own rule,” she said.
In case it might be helpful to someone.
There is a small suite of postings (5 – – the links are further down) on my blog to remove any doubt about the authenticity of the WEF and their agenda. They have “half the Trudeau cabinet” in pocket – – Klaus Schwab in video. Etc.
Sandra
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If I can piece this together, there are a whole lot of people, especially in the U.S. who can do it better and did it a long time ago.
As it happens:
While I was watching live-stream of the situation in Ottawa on Friday,
Watching the toe-to-toe line of protestors with the police,
I would have liked to quiet the line. And announce:
This is about an experimental drug and whether people including children, should be forcibly injected with it. That is ALL it is about.
WHAT IN GODS’ NAME is so important that the Government MUST HAVE ALL PEOPLE AND CHILDREN INJECTED? Once, twice, thrice, 4 times, more . . . and none of that good enough, more boosters, every how many months?!
That issue has caused the Government to bring in all these police from Ontario and elsewhere. There are snipers on roof-tops, a helicopter overhead; armoured vehicle in the background. Police are on O.T. and housed in the Chateau Laurier.
The protest is demonstrably peaceful.
Many Police are soft on the issue. Which is why the Protestors are receiving leaked information to help them in their struggle. Many Tow Truck companies in Ottawa won’t help the Police by responding to calls for tow trucks to take trucks away.
AND THEN – –
I received an article by Chris George that documents Chrystia Freeland’s relationship to the World Economic Forum, published in the Niagara Independent. Which is all I needed – – as explained below. . . . It’s a good article. (Freeland – Canadian Minister of Finance)
I sent the email below to author of the article, Chris George.
Many people dismiss the World Economic Forum (WEF) as “conspiracy theory”, along with its “Great Reset” agenda.
The article by C George is another blow to the ability to dismiss the WEF.
There is a small suite of postings on my blog to remove any doubt about the authenticity of the WEF and their agenda. They are the reason that traditional means of bringing about corrections to Government policies do not, will not, and can not work.
Klaus Schwab is the founder of the WEF and the author of the book, “The Great Reset”.
– – keep reading. I have watched the video in which Schwab states (in a moment of ill-advised hubris, I’d say): he uses the word “infiltrated” in relation to the Trudeau Cabinet. (Not only the Canadian cabinet.)
2022-01-26 Klaus Schwab: half of the Canadian Cabinet are from the “Young Global Leaders” program of the WEF a SHORT VIDEO.
The C George article re Freeland’s relationship to the WEF: as explained below, I looked into Freeland in 2015. Only because I recognized the name “Larry Summers” from the Wall Street crimes in 2007-08.
You may want to know what The Great Reset has in mind for your children and grand children. Canadians are getting a taste of it right now. Jason Kenney (I am not a fan of) expands a bit on what the WEF envisions – he does it well, to my surprise! – – Schwab sent him a copy of the book.
See also: 2017-12-20 Trudeau and the Aga Khan.
EMAIL TO CHRIS GEORGE
From: Sandra Finley
Sent: February 19, 2022 8:20 PM
Subject: your article, Where is Chrystia Freeland’s priority?
Summers was brought in by the Liberals in advance of the 2015 Election. Ostensibly to advise them on Economic Policy which was seen as their weak point in defeating the Harper Conservatives. It was Trudeau’s first run at the Prime Ministership.
I remembered Summers’ name – – advisor to Obama whose advice meant that the Wall Street racketeers (2007-08) got off scot-free and with grand largesse from the public purse.
That Summers would be advising a potential Canadian Government sounded clanging alarm bells in my brain.
Freeland did her PhD (Harvard) under Larry Summers (Economics), who a bit later became President of Harvard.
His dealings with Russians – – big dollar contracts – -, helping them with Capitalism… Summers was basically scamming the Russians. They brought suit in the U.S.. And won.
As a consequence, the U.S. Govt fined Harvard $26 Million to cover the costs and settlement of the Russian lawsuit.
Harvard was furious with Summers over the $26 million fine, needless to say! Some Harvard profs had previously been complaining about the integrity of Summers’ work; they were vindicated – – Summers was dumped as Pres of Harvard.
The petals fell off the sweet-smelling rose for the Russians; they lost their enthusiasm for contracting with U.S. “specialists” who could guide them in the ways of capitalism. Other “partnerships” also suffered from the thorns.
Summers fell on hard times with a tarnished reputation until Freeland, in her role at the Financial Times, offered her former thesis supervisor a weekly column. Which was successful; his columns were well received . . . fast forward – – Summers’ net worth saw a steep incline, Wall Street contracts — then the 2007—08 fiasco and Summers’ advisory role to Obama. No prosecutions. Yahda, yahda.
So now, the Cdn Liberals need advisors for economic policy (2015). They bring in Summers. Also Dominic Barton.
INSERT: I just did some quick reading re the Trudeaus and their visits to the Aga Khan’s island in the Bahamas. The first trip was in 2014.
By this time, these people are all intertwined with the globalist money elites.
I don’t know the order of things: Freeland was recruited to run for the Liberals . . . by . . . who?
Trudeau had already (?) been recruited by Klaus Schwab (WEF, Young Global Leaders Program). Who was it that brought in Summers, the shady guys, the financial mafiosos from the Wall Street betrayal of Main Street?
When Klaus Schwab (video link below) says that Trudeau is one of their guys (WEF), and that the WEF has “infiltrated” the Trudeau Cabinet (they have half of the Cabinet), of course, as you document very well – – Freeland is one of theirs.
I am encouraged: mis-characterization of the WEF and the Great Reset as “conspiracy theory” is breaking into the public discourse. Your article is helpful.
I was surprised by the following video – – Kenney saying: the Great Reset is the title of a book. He should know because Klaus Schwab sent him a copy. He goes on to ridicule the Davos crowd.
INSERT:
That is ALL it is about. It’s why there is so much support for the Truckers, around the world. Lots of people KNOW. Just like lots of people knew about Epstein. Circles of the wealthy – – it’s why $20 million has been donated to the Truckers Freedom Convoy. Not because of funding by “terrorists”. It’s funding by wealthy people with a conscience. It’s a matter of how to nail the perpetrators. Don’t worry – – it’s in the works.
There may be something in the following postings that will be beneficial to you or to someone else.
Best wishes,
Sandra Finley www.sandrafinley.ca
Vancouver Island 250-594-9898
Here you see Ottawa mayor Watson at the WEF. (He has quite a long history of association, not shown.)
I think this is an important contribution; an “influencer” of some public opinion puts these “globalist” forces on the table. Named.
There is too much in these next postings, done over a few years. They are for skimming. The first one might be sufficient.
https://sandrafinley.ca/blog/?p=19166\
https://sandrafinley.ca/blog/?p=19316
https://sandrafinley.ca/blog/?p=19172
The “re-branding” of capitalism after the 2007-08 fall from grace.
The House of Commons vote on the Emergency Act is today, Monday Feb 21, 8 PM. We need to raise a storm of protest.
From Alex, with thanks.
Here’s a sample email you can send to senators:
There’s a little work involved in getting all the email addresses of the Senators but this is a worthy cause.
Please everyone – see the info below and send a Letter/Email asap.
If the Emergencies Act is approved in Parliament, it must THEN be passed in the Senate. Here are the senators: https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/ email addresses are first name (dot) last name (at) sen.parl.gc.ca
Please write to them asap. Sample letter below. Please share and encourage everyone you know to write to them: 🙏🙏
Dear Senator,
As you are aware, our Prime Minister has proposed the Emergencies Act which must first be passed in Parliament and then through the Senate.
As a Canadian citizen, I implore you NOT to pass this Act. Why?
1) Section 2 (c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the freedom of “peaceful assembly.” [1] It is one of the fundamental freedoms protected in the Charter.
2) The Emergency Act is meant to protect the “safety and security of the individual, the protection of the values of the body politic and the preservation of the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of the state are fundamental obligations of government; AND WHEREAS the fulfilment of those obligations in Canada may be seriously threatened by a national emergency.”
The truckers are not preventing the government from getting on with the business of governing. No Ottawa citizen or member of Parliament are being “seriously threatened.” The truckers are protecting the values and freedoms of Canadian citizens that are slowly being eroded, and preserving their rights of bodily autonomy and medical sovereignty. The truckers’ peaceful protest does not meet the threshold for a “national emergency” as defined in the Act.
3) These hard-working Freedom Convoy Truckers—the ones who deliver our food and other goods day in and day out– have been peaceful, respectful and law-abiding. They are not violent nor have they destroyed property. On the contrary, they have cleared the streets of snow and garbage, and crime in the City of Ottawa has plummeted since their arrival.
4) As per the request of the Ottawa police, the Convoy has left a lane open for emergency vehicles. They have stopped the honking of horns.
5) Theirs is a simple, common sense request at the 2-year mark of this “pandemic”—stop all COVID restrictions which have negatively impacted our children, our economy, our health and our society; restrictions which have been shown to have little, if any, impact on “flattening the curve”.
6) The pandemic is over. Omicron creates mild symptoms. It’s time to resume normal life once again without fear.
7) Our hospitals are not overwhelmed. Period.
8) These patriotic men and women have left their homes and family for a cause that is held dearly by ALL Canadians. They have inspired a nationwide and international movement in the drive for freedom. All national and global attention sits squarely on Canada at this historical moment in time. Where will each of you take your seat in history.
Below, please find the list of countries, states and jurisdictions which have lifted all COVID restrictions.
(INSERT: I didn’t receive the list. /Sandra)
Senators, there is no need to escalate what is currently a civil, peaceful, legal protest (albeit with vehicles illegally parked and ticketed). There is a practical political solution. It just needs adequate time and patience to unfold. Please allow it to come to its logical conclusion rather than creating yet another stain on our Canadian history by passing the Emergencies Act. Do not pass the Emergencies Act.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely yours,
Ray writes:
an excellent distillation of the ‘looming’ ( and already present) headwaters coming down the pike!
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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Like many, I have spent the last couple of weeks a bit entranced by the trucker protests happening in Canada (and now around the world, from Paris to Wellington). I initially tried to document here every twist and turn of the Freedom Convoy drama, but found it nearly impossible. Events continue to unfold very quickly. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just invoked the Emergencies Act (i.e. martial law), allowing him to suspend civil liberties and basically do whatever he wants (more on that later) to crush the protests. So they may soon be quelled. Or perhaps not. No one can yet say precisely how all this may end.
But in any case news and commentary detailing the protests can now be found everywhere, so I’m just going to assume you already have a familiarity with what’s happening, as I want to try to distill a few more unique thoughts on why I find these protests so striking.
Specifically, why all this seems like such a perfect reflection of the Reality War.
In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”
In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”
I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
So let’s consider this using the protests as a lens, and vice versa.
To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.
The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.
For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.
When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.
Much has rightly been made of the “working class” and their alienation from “the elite.” But this phrasing comes mixed up with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many (though not all) of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to frequently be either fairly solidly middle-class skilled tradesmen, relatively successful small businessmen, or land-holders (e.g. farmers, ranchers, real estate entrepreneurs) who are often actually relatively well-off. It is the character of their work that seems to shape the common identity and values of each side of the class divide more than income.
So too does this difference appear to widen – and perhaps even help explain the root of – the huge and growing gender divide in politics, given the fairly well-established preference (on average) by men to work with “things” (more concrete) and women to work with “people” (more abstract).
Meanwhile, this class divide also maps closely onto another much-discussed political wedge: the geographic split between cities, where most of the Virtuals are concentrated, and the outlying exurbs and rural hinterlands, where the Physicals remain predominant. I would suggest the nature of these two classes plays a significant role in shaping the local cultures of these places. And as anyone following events in the United States, U.K., Australia, or Europe over the last few years (such as Brexit, or the Yellow Vest protests in France) could tell you by now, partisan differences between urban metropolitan cores and provinces seem to have become one of the defining features of politics across the Western democratic world.
Below is a map of the eastern half of the United States showing at very high detail the geographic distribution of votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. The urban-rural divide between political parties couldn’t be more stark.
Differences in the Canadian electoral system mean I can’t show you a similar map for Canada, but you can be assured that the urban-rural divide there is just as significant.
But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.
In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.
But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.
The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.
When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking brakes (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world.
It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening.
The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable.
Their first reaction was to dismiss the 50,000-strong convoy as representing, in Trudeau’s words, a “small fringe minority with unacceptable views.” Being, after all, divorced from reality, he did not seem to have any understanding of the implications of what was barreling toward him. No one in his government seems to have prepared at all in the days leading up to the truckers’ arrival as the Freedom Convoy drove all the way across the country to Ottawa.
But once they grasped the situation, the Virtuals’ response was to turn immediately to their default means of dealing with any problem: narrative and informational control.
Trudeau checked his diary list of most used phrases and – after fleeing the city for “security reasons” – unleashed all of them at once in one great shotgun blast of smears, saying the truckers were guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” not to mention “misogyny” and being “anti-science.” He accused them of flying “racist flags” and “waving swastikas” (only one seems to have ever been spotted, before being swiftly ejected by the crowd), and announced that he would refuse to meet with them because of he could not go “anywhere near protests that have expressed hateful rhetoric and violence.” He declared Canadians to be “shocked and frankly, disgusted” with the protestors.
His class allies leaped to the same line of attack. Catherine McKenney, Ottawa’s non-binary, social justice-loving councilor, accused the Freedom Convoy of promoting “very right-wing extremist messages” and being “part of a movement, that is extreme and that is xenophobic.” Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly declared them to be “increasingly dangerous” and “hateful.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford labeled it “an occupation” and a “siege.” The chair of the city’s police services board ranted that the “siege” was part of a “nationwide insurrection” and “a threat to our democracy.” Angry demands started being made for Trudeau to call in the military.
Canadian state media lustily played along, attempting to ham-fistedly shove the whole phenomenon into an American political frame. The whole convoy was a “pseudo-Trumpian grift” that was “organized and led by documented racists and QAnon-style nutters.” Anchors gravely compared footage of smiling, Canadian flag waving grandmas, diverse crowds of dancing Sikhs, and children playing in bouncy castles to “January 6” and “white supremacy.” American outlets like Politico and the New York Times warned of the “far-right” having been “galvanized” worldwide. Allegations of the protests having been organized and funded by no less than the Russians were seriously aired.
Academic “extremism experts” were trundled onto television to confirm that this was in fact a pack of literal terrorists, and that if even the protests were technically entirely peaceful (crime in downtown Ottawa having actually fallen), this was only a maliciously cunning cover to enable mass violence. “By what common understanding of the term does what we are seeing on the ground, on TV, in our social media feeds qualify as ‘peaceful protest?’” asked one, presumably talking about the hug-ins, or maybe the on-site meals for the homeless. “Is it merely the absence of physical violence and injury? That’s not unimportant but is insufficient as a definitional threshold.” TV talking heads nod sagely.
Facebook and Twitter of course also quickly shut down the accounts and groups set up by protestors to communicate (often with hundreds of thousands of members), not only in Canada but in countries across the world. They cited the need to prevent the spread of “misinformation.”
If all this seemed awfully synchronized, that’s the whole point. Systematic information control, or what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as “public opinion management,” is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem.
But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).
Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks.
The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing.
Meanwhile, even the narrative reframing trick – which usually works great – has been failing. There’s simply been too wide a gulf between what citizens have been told and what they can see with their own eyes. Sympathy for the truckers’ cause actually seems to have grown. More than half of Canadians now oppose continuing to mandate vaccines, and two-thirds now support removing COVID-19 restrictions. Multiple Liberal MPs have turned on Trudeau to speak out against his approach. Five provinces have now moved to end pandemic restrictions, including Ontario.
No matter how desperately Trudeau has scrambled to change the narrative, he hasn’t yet succeeded. Even a gambit to threaten the truckers with having their children removed by child protection services – presumably to make it easier to instigate a narratively convenient violent confrontation – has only led to backlash so far. Relentless discipline by the truckers has provided him with almost nothing to work with.
Which is why the Virtual elite have steadily escalated up the ladder of more and more coercive informational control, leveraging their hold on state power to try to compel compliance by the revolting Physicals. This began with the government requesting crowdfunding site GoFundMe shut down the $10 million in funds raised there for the truckers. The company complied immediately, saying the Freedom Convoy had engaged in “an abuse of power” (what power was unclear) and was supporting “hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, and intolerance.” Then came as many legal fines for obscure violations as authorities could find to throw at the truckers, while a replacement fundraiser on GiveSendGo was also frozen by a Canadian court.
But now, with the protests in their third week, Trudeau has gone nuclear, invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act for the first time in its history. A renamed version of what was once called the War Measures Act, this allows him to override civil liberty protections in order “to remove the blockades, including by force.” Trudeau specified this includes the ability to compel the tow companies to move the trucks.
And while Trudeau has denied that he will use his new powers to deploy the military against the Canadian people, his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that financial institutions will be instructed to “cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” and that that they “will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order” and with full “protection against civil liability.” All crowd-funding platforms will now also fall under the control of “Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules,” which will require fundraising campaigns to be approved by Canadian intelligence services.
That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters.
And here the Virtuals have a significant advantage because they are free to use the maximum level of coercive force available in their natural domain, while the Physicals cannot – because, in the physical world, that would mean violence, which is something the protestors have rightly forsworn.
So, the current trucker protests in Canada may soon be brought to a close by the state. But this is unlikely to mark the end of the story.
The great Honkening of 2022 has already been revelatory to people around the world. It is the climax of a process in which all the divides in society, including between the “Physicals” and “Virtuals” I’ve described here, have been revealed by the pandemic and governments’ responses. At the same time, the pandemic served to clarify the continued reliance of the Virtual class on “essential workers.” The revelation of the exceptional vulnerability of modern supply chains has demonstrated very clearly to everyone paying attention that the Physicals still possess tremendous power of their own as long as they are able to act in unity and solidarity – or as many signs at the protests have pointed out to the Virtuals: “no truckers, no food.”
In this sense the Freedom Convoy has already become the most successful labor movement in decades, awakening a genuine new “class consciousness” (as a Marxist would put it) in the minds of the reality-based “working class.” And it is notable that this has already become a transnational phenomenon, with the convoy protests spreading like wildfire around the globe precisely because the exact same divide now exists in so many developed countries, where the Virtual ruling class has everywhere overreached with similarly hubris.
Naturally, the Virtuals have everywhere greeted this development with horror. Looking at the map above, or out their windows, they may have realized just how vulnerable they are holed up in their cities. Perhaps they are imagining that, should the Physicals outside – who they once felt safe to ignore – engage in not just scattered protests but a full-scale revolutionary revolt, or even simply a general strike – suspending all movement of goods – their bastions of enlightened civilization would be starving, shivering, and buried in trash within a week.
So of course they hate and fear the truckers. It’s no wonder that Trudeau is panicking and behaving a bit like a dictator facing an existential challenge to his rule. In a sense he is.
There is an obvious irony here in the fact that ostensibly left-wing parties, like Trudeau’s Liberals, have everywhere turned viciously on the working class – an observation that is now widespread, as far as I can tell thanks mainly to the satirists at the Babylon Bee – but this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occured across the West as the “left” became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress.
For the Virtual elite, the most unforgiveable thing about the Physicals, and the physical world in general, is that they stubbornly refuse to yield to full, frictionless control. There is a reason the dominant informational class is today most comfortable in a purely virtual environment – it’s one where they can have direct, instantaneous control over (virtual) matter. Real matter is stubbornly resistant, a reminder that the self doesn’t control the universe. It’s dirty, polluting, a reminder of one’s vulnerability, even mortality. And the need to rely on other humans to deal with it is super awkward.
So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.
But at least in the near term it’s Physicals like the truckers that have the advantage. They are the ones with the real leverage, and now they know it.
Trudeau and co. just better hope the workers don’t start reading Mao like he did in his youth, or they’ll learn all about how that revolutionary managed to win by “surrounding the cities from the countryside.” Or how Mao began his revolution by declaring that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” – but then the Canucks seem to have already managed to do that part already.
