Oh, Canada!
So now they’re arresting the organizers of the demonstrations in Canada.
Why is this tyrannical behavior being manifested in Canada of all places, that mild-mannered country to the north where the folks say “oot” for “out” and sometimes add “eh” at the end of their sentences?
My theories:
(1) Because Canada is a country populated by unusually polite and relatively docile people, there hasn’t been much pushback against increased authority during the COVID years till now, which has made the authorities feel safe to be very controlling and authoritarian.
(2) Canada doesn’t have a robust history of free speech or liberty in general, compared to the US. For example, hate speech laws have been in place there for quite some time. And Jordan Peterson got his start by challenging – on liberty grounds – rules that compelled the use of certain pronouns.
(3) Canada never fought to free itself from Britain. In fact, many US Tories fled there as a result of our own revolution.
(4) Trudeau is a woke narcissist who has felt entitled from birth. He’s a bit like Joe Biden without the age-related cognitive challenges.
(5) Canada has a state-controlled and compliant TV and radio media known as the CBC which is supportive of the left-leaning government.
(6) Canada has a handy Emergencies Act that’s quite murky in its details, broad in the powers it grants government, and has never been tested before so there is no precedent for its use.
(7) Canada has the US treatment of the January 6th demonstrators as inspiration: demonize your opponents and then crack down, hard. What’s happening in Canada now is somewhat different but definitely related, and the January 6th experience probably emboldened Trudeau.
NOTE: I tried to embed a section of this video with Viva Frei, but embedding wasn’t allowed. So I suggest you click on the link and watch 11:34 through 14:22.
NOTE II: The title of this post is a reference to the Canadian national anthem.
There is also this. Get arrested for skiing without a mask in Canada.
Canada may be lost.
https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1494719216070676485?s=12
}}} The title of this post is a reference to the Canadian national anthem.
It’s also riffing on the name of a TV show, as I recall.
Oh (someone’s name).
Usually someone who got into trouble due to various hijinks.
I might be misremembering.
}}} Canada may be lost.
It is if the Canucks put up with this crap.
O Canada, O mores.
Viva Frei has been detailing for a couple years now how weak the Canadian judiciary is also. They have offered almost no pushback there whereas here we have had quite a bit (but not nearly enough) against out of control politicians and bureaucrats.
Viva has also talked about how an insane amount of the advertising on radio and TV is government propaganda about COVID and that means the media is reliant on the gov’t for revenue so of course they are going to parrot the state fed line.
Several weeks ago, in one of the threads here, I mentioned one of my neighbors, a Canadian scold, who chose a holiday party as the occasion to rant about “the unvaccinated” and to voice her conviction that such Deplorables/Unacceptables deserve no medical care of any kind, particulary the kind available in an ICU. Mostly out of respect for our hosts (while also mindful of Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies”), I let the moment pass largely in silence (with only a brief mention of some date out of Israel) but later wrote a poem about the incident and the repressive psychopolitical environment that allowed it. Here, from the forthcoming chapbook, is that poem.
**********
LATE ANTHROPOCENE COCKTAILS
Elegant, slender
as a champagne flute, she held
court at the punchbowl,
parted her lips and set free
a spotted menagerie
of amphibians.
Salamander grunts secured
the perimeter
while broad-jumping frogs splashed down
in the red sangria to
take positions on
orange archipelagos.
No one said a word
about the occupiers.
No one even noticed them.
No one talked about the fires
set every night under the bridges,
the overloaded dumpsters
soaked with kerosene and torched behind
the Art Deco apartments.
We knew better. We kept our mouths shut
even with our closest friends.
All of us were closemouthed anyway,
one unguarded word away
from the flashing muzzle and the mob.
No one talked about the fires.
We knew better. We kept our mouths shut
or stopped them up with popcorn.
We spit out kernels of comity
even with our closest friends.
We dabbed our lips clean in the firelight.
My own Canadian relatives were not unusually polite or reasonably docile. My French-Canadian grandfather expressed his virulent anti-semitism in the language of Molière. My Scots-Irish grandfather was prone to fisticuffs and used to swear in his sleep. The Great White North was not a place for candy-asses.
Viva Frei’s full name is David Freiheit, Freiheit being the German word for freedom, so an apt name. He has a degree in civil law from Université Laval and has worked in the field of commercial litigation.
tcrosse:
Is it an urban vs rural thing?
Canada has a whole lot of wide open empty.
I was disappointed how the Alberta apparatchiks treated the immigrant pastor from Poland a few months ago, but they haven’t been full on Ottawa lately. Sort of like what is expected in the Accella corridor and Washington DC?
We must stop this blockade of international trade by locking up all these truckers who we need to move our international trade.
I think the Powers believe that the End Game will be the arrests, freezing assets, etc. I don’t think it will though. A lot more to happen.
The impounding and destroying of Pets is just spite.
The software manager I worked with at Broderbund was Canadian. She felt Canadians were superior to typical Americans.
She fit right in in Marin County.
@SHIREHOME: I knew that the impounding and destroying of pets was being threatened, but is that happening now? That, if nothing else, should be the end of Trudeau—which is to be hoped for, but not at such a price. Even the threat is despicable.
Petition to U.N. condemning Trudeau’s actions:
https://lifepetitions.com/petition/call-on-world-leaders-to-condemn-trudeau-s-police-state-tactics
Massacre of the Innocents by our present day Herod of Ottawa.
Brandeau may want to stock up on Ivermectin.
You should all watch the Viva Frei vid I linked on the open thread. Scroll up to the section where he’s on the front line as the police inch slowly forward. He said they’re hoping for a response which will then justify a violent crackdown. So far the protesters are not taking the bait. Also compelling is the fencing around Parliament. Remind anyone of something similar?
He said tomorrow will be big as he expects even more people descending on Ottawa.
More live feed of faceoff between cops and truckers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlsbFbRLCY&ab_channel=WARCAMPAIGN
Euthenizing the pets of arrested protesters is beyond the pale but the Trudeau administration is threatening to also take away the arrested protester’s children. How’s that for a full helping of intimidation?
Of course, those not yet arrested whose bank accounts are frozen, insurance canceled and trucks confiscated will be unable to provide for their children either, so ‘compassionate’ seizure of those children will have to be done as well, right?
Destroying their livelihood, bankrupting them and imprisoning them.
These are the actions of real tyrants. Not even King George dreamed of its like.
History only reveals one cure for tyranny.
BTW, Trudeau prevented Parliament from meeting today, stating it to be “too dangerous” for Parliament to meet.
Coincidentally… this was reported to be the first day in which Parliament could vote on whether Trudeau’s invocation of Canada’s National Security Act was valid. A mandatory provision of the Act. Not that it matters, as the Act also specifically bans its invocation in the case of protesters.
No doubt Trudeau has already called upon the Governor General of Canada to disband Parliament. Which happened in 2021 with new national elections them held. If Trudeau gets the Governor General to disband Parliament, I fully expect Trudeau to ‘put off’ elections till the national ’emergency’ is over, it being “too dangerous” for the voters.
Trudeau is emulating his father’s example… El Presidente for Life.
I think Trudeau is done. ‘Put a fork in it,’ as they say.
They are not leaders if they do not talk to the citizens with dissenting views. It is happening here in ‘down under’ land. The people running a number of Western Countries are weak. That goes for old Joe too.
The good news; Austria is getting rid of a lot of Covid measures.
Neo: your Seven Roads To Truth all strike this humble observer (and Canadian) as pretty solid. In a way the situation is overdetermined and I suppose historians will record, as with “Guns of August,” how this was fated to be. My own conjecture is that (on top of your theories) the Pandemia (as Alex Berenson calls it in his excellent book) has stratified society. There are the worker bees, the “essential” workers who hew wood and bring water; and then there are the laptop class, mind-workers, in love with their systems and frankly no longer in touch with (enough of) the world where wood must be hewn and water must be carried. We have always had these classes, these groups; but the past two years have not only isolated one from the other, like cathode from anode; but created a gradient. The laptop class worship safety from their palaces of abstraction. Justin Trudeau can do no wrong: just don’t mess with their paychecks and pensions. They are not unhappy with continuing Covidiocy for years to come, because one cannot be too safe. And they feel “free,” zooming around the Internet as they please.
Meanwhile the truckers and those like them –those who have survived job loss, bankruptcy, school closure, the whiplash of Faucism (my coinage for “inconsistent ukases by health experts”)– have had more than their fill of Covidiocy. They have lived through the “crisis,” and are no longer persuaded by bare claims of emergency. Omicron has put the lie to the idea that vaccination will shield you from being infected or, later, transmitting the virus. Without that idea, vaccine mandates are not just futile but a tyrannical imposition.
It’s a kind of Rubicon, I guess. I don’t see Trudeau surviving this, because I expect the next move (and the Freedom Convoy people have the initiative here) will involve a sharp drop in truck traffic to Ottawa. Bare shelves and empty fuel lines may result. Not a good situation but the historical alignment of forces seems to have dictated it.
In one of his pieces Dave Barry made a passing reference to “Canada (a moose preserve north of Maine).”
Fun fact: the words of Oh Canada can be sung to the tune of Schubert’s An die Musik.
@tcrosse:
“Fun fact: the words of Oh Canada can be sung to the tune of Schubert’s An die Musik.”
I’ve got nothing against Canadians, but that’s sacrilege.
An amazing admission, Z, has nothing against Canadians. These are troubling times. 🙂
@Om:
In truth, I’d probably bulldoze a good 30% of them… but don’t tell anyone 😛
The French side certainly did. Newfoundland was an independent county until after WW1. They sent their own army to fight in the trenches.
Newfoundland was an independent county until after WW1.
It was a British colony. It had ‘dominion status’ for a time. Dominions were not formally sovereign until 1931.
Z, about that great wisdom from traditional Chinese practices:
https://www.science.org/content/article/wild-animals-prized-delicacies-china-contain-bevy-threatening-viruses
You may have some ‘splain’n to do Lucy.
Very good comment by Owen.
I might disagree on Trudeau’s inability to survive this, but that’s just me not wanting to be disappointed.
In other news, our own laptop class of safety seeking wine moms and soy boys seem to have greased the skids to a Putin invasion of Ukraine with their elevation of floundering incoherent moron Joe Biden to the Executive Office.
This is the way of progs of course. To flaunt their incompetence until they encourage a transgression that otherwise would not have taken place. Then to call on national unity in a time of crisis and upon the sons of the rednecks to bail their asses out.
Piss on national unity with these corrupt, lying, and despicable people.
@Om:
It’s no secret that Tiddly ( = Wink ->> Chink –> Cockney rhyming slang for John Chinaman) likes to chow down on endangered species and also intensively farms animals of different species in close proximity leading to errr sub-optimal health outcomes. Not good and is officially frowned upon. Let’s hope it stops one day.
Still you’re more likely to explode horror movie-wise from some African Bush Meat derived Ebola variant than expire in some Chinese plague.
No fan of the WuFlu but 2 years in it’s probably got more to tell us about Western Oligarch Elites, their politician puppets, and their Managerialist Minions than it has to tell us about China. No real harm in your prejudices about China provided you focus most of your brainpower on what’s wrong at home.
Z:
Where did the WuFlu come from again? Nothing to see? Fauchi and his fellow fraudsters didn’t spring this on the world from Fort Dietrich MD or have the CCP lying to the whole world for 6 months or more.
So you notice that Bush Meat and China cuisine are both a bit problematic. How can that be? 3000 years of advanced superior culture couldn’t figure this out? Shocked. Just shocked.
@ DNW > “This is the way of progs of course. To flaunt their incompetence until they encourage a transgression that otherwise would not have taken place. Then to call on national unity in a time of crisis and upon the sons of the rednecks to bail their asses out.
Piss on national unity with these corrupt, lying, and despicable people.”
Is this you?? (from comment thread at Powerline)
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a99b799d7d73f0d5e3270b48fc717376b4711399c0daca939ad98ffc40405842.png?w=600&h=330
@ Neo > “What’s happening in Canada now is somewhat different but definitely related, and the January 6th experience probably emboldened Trudeau.”
I was just thinking about the similarities that are cropping up – Brandon seems to have sent Brandeau his playbook.
Of course, the primary parallel is this:
the protests were engendered by refusal of the government to even consider that the protesters had valid complaints.
(1) protesters physically petitioned their representatives for redress of grievances (Congress, Parliament);
(2) government failed to address the complaints due to direct or presumed threats from the protesters (rejected investigation of election after the “insurrection,” adjourned without addressing the legality of the Emergency Powers actions);
(3) innocent protesters killed by police action (Rosanne Boyland in the tunnel, unnamed Grandma in the street – but please don’t blame the horses);
[“Innocent” in this case means “not actively violent” — the violent ones still haven’t been arrested for the January 6th invasion of the Capitol that was occurring on the other side of the building from the tourist-protesters who are now in the DC Gulag, and there has been NO violence in Ottawa – yet.]
(4) innocent protesters harassed and intimidated by legal and illegal means (too many correspondences to list, but it may be time to stick some cash under your mattress, and always donate using a pseudonym);
(5) there is not an American analog to the confiscation of pets and kids, but there would have been if DC had been besieged as Ottawa was.
I think the parallels will diverge somewhat at this point, because of the nature of the protesters.
(6) The J6 protestors were an unorganized, uncoordinated, random assortment of people, but the Canadians are a very organized, coherent identifiable group of truckers;
(7) the J6 prisoners were essentially picked up one at a time with no central “command post” to advocate for them or assist in their defense, but although the truckers can be arrested singly, there is a central leadership and a solidarity of membership that may be able to help them;
(8) the J6 protesters-prisoners have to depend on their own resources, but the Truckers have millions in donations IF they can get them out of the hands of the Stasi – and if not, I expect they will find some way to get around the illegal confiscations;
(9) the J6 prisoners are individuals without leverage – only their family misses them because they are in jail, but the truckers are — the irony is hot — “essential workers” and the economy will notice they are gone if incarcerated;
[yes, the protesters are a minority of Canadian truckers, but the supply chain is already hurting for lack of drivers – as zenman said, “We must stop this blockade of international trade by locking up all these truckers who we need to move our international trade.”]
(10) the J6 “insurrection” happened so fast, and the narrative was set so early, it’s been hard to drum up support for them outside the MAGA true believers, but the Canadian protests have a lot of positive print and media momentum that the Government Press (in both countries) has not been able to totally suppress.
I make no predictions for the eventual outcome, but I think the Canadian situation is going to be a lot messier than Trudeau & Cie. are anticipating from the American example.
Footnote – includes references to Boyland, but I hadn’t heard White’s story before:
https://gellerreport.com/2021/12/january-6-police-beating-victim-speaks-i-could-have-died-j-6-attorney-releases-video-of-capitol-police-pummeling-female-trump-supporter-victoria-white-in-tunnel-area-bea.html/
The dead Canadian woman
Seen on Gab
“This indigenous woman has reportedly been murdered by being trampled to death by Ottawa Police and then they tried to cover it up with fake news that someone threw a bike at the police.”
“The woman was showing off her dress. NO ONE THREW A F****** BIKE. They trampled her f****** walker.”
Question is, will there be a trucker’s strike or a general strike?
Re: with respect to Owen’s comment. This morning on AT an article which claims that the majority of Canadians actually support what Trudeau is doing. Of course this relies on”polls”, but it does make me want to hear from more on the ground Canadians as to what the general populace is thinking.
We’ve got friends in Canada and my husband has a lot of Canadian relations. As far as I can tell, there has been no crossing of ideological lines. Indeed, our friends in Montreal (Anglos) had been talking as if the Wehrmacht had occupied Ottawa. They told us last night that the truckers were all agents of the American right-wingers, which I see is indeed what is being put forth by their government. Absolutely no sympathy at all to the truckers, at all.
Which is ironic, as they complain endlessly about the Quebec government’s high handedness, mandating that all business records, even internal emails, be written in French and open to inspection as illegal, violations of privacy, etc. When we talked to them on New Year’s Eve, the she of the couple was literally in tears at the reimposition of curfews, etc.
But Trudeau, Brandon, etc. use those “othering” labels which seem absurd to us, because they are utterly persuasive to their client base.
@ Nancy B > “But Trudeau, Brandon, etc. use those “othering” labels which seem absurd to us, because they are utterly persuasive to their client base.”
And this is how they do it, and why it works.
Long but excellent post; I’m only going to copy a few “pull quotes” – most of you can fill in the ellipses, but Sundance is so eloquent you may want to RTWT.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/02/18/the-democracy-disconnect-in-canada-highlights-a-big-mistake-conservatives-make/
ABSOLUTELY riveting comments and commentary from Owen, Nancy B, and AesopFan — culminating in this denouement from Sundance by the latter.
HUZZAHs! To all!
And Australia. And New Zealand. And J6 DC Gulag.
What do 3 countries have in common? Windsor.
@ MollyG > forgot to compliment you earlier on your illustrious poem.
Very insightful.
It’s a foreign country.
South Park was right!