Op-Ed: As goes Canada?

Triumph can reveal the inner nature of a person. In the wake of the repression of the truckers' civil rights protest in and beyond Ottawa, many masks of moderation have slipped to reveal a manic zealotry.

Online forums show members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who had been marketed to the world as real life "Dudley Do-Rights," reveling about the truckers finally hearing, "… our jackboots on the ground." This dark tendency to thrill in bullying citizens who were engaged in peaceful civil disobedience shows the character flaws of those recruited in recent years.

Peter Sloly heroically resigned as Ottawa's Police Chief rather than engage in an unprecedented repression. His successor, Interim Police Chief Steve Bell, speaks of his intention to hound anyone, anywhere, who supported the Freedom Convoy with words or money over the long term.

Ottawa's mayor announced his intention to try to sell all seized protester property, specifically their Big Rig trucks, to defray the costs of the police's suppression. This relish for financial revenge accompanies the government's abuse of Emergency Banking Authority which froze all monetary assets of protesting Canadians as if they were foreign terrorists or drug kingpins.

This is all in line with Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's demagoguery, where, instead of talking with his fellow Canadians, he demonized them. Trudeau claimed that a civil rights protest was so dangerous that the only way to protect freedom was to use Emergency Powers.

This is analogous to the old Viet Nam War saying, "We destroyed that village in order to save it.”

Trudeau has just announced his intention to lift the State of Emergency in most ways. Bank accounts will slowly be unfrozen. This does not wash away his abuse of Emergency Powers to punish political opponents.

To their everlasting shame, his Liberal Party Coalition with the New Democratic Party voted in Parliament to support his actions. Unless some kind of No Confidence Vote is made, none of Trudeau's accomplices will have to face voters until Oct. 20, 2025. No doubt, they calculate that Canada's electorate will have long since forgotten by then how their civil liberties were stolen capriciously by a brittle politician.

Throughout the triumphal gloating, there is a sense of vicious glee that the establishment's political enemies were getting their comeuppance. The violent repression of peaceful protesters is being lauded as having saved Canada.

As I write, D.C. Democrats are preparing to mobilize the National Guard as they did after Jan. 6, 2021. This, in response to an American variant of the Freedom Convoy that has not even as yet materialized anywhere near the District of Columbia.

The fact that Trudeau's fellow-perpetrators are exulting in the exercise of naked force is crucial in understanding their truth; they do not see themselves as fellow citizens within a democracy. They are above any need to wrangle or compromise, and anticipate the chance to exercise dominance over mere commoners. This suppression was never just about the truckers. It was always about demonstrating their willingness to harm anyone who dissented from their orthodoxy.

All of this is a test case for the wider Western world. Will COVID hysteria translate into the permanent application of the coercive powers of the state? Will previously normalized freedoms of speech, assembly, and conscience be overridden? As goes Canada, will the Western World follow?

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com