Canada’s Parliament votes to extend the Emergencies Act for 30 days

The New Neo Posted on by

The vote was mostly along mostly party lines. The “yeas” represented the same coalition that gave Trudeau his last two wins. What’s more, I believe the majority of the feedback they’re getting from Canadians is supportive as well, because the measure “restores order.”

Trudeau will be further emboldened by this action.

It’s especially sad as well as outrageous that some of those who voted for the measure think the measure is wrong:

It passed because it ultimately became something of a confidence vote and they didn’t want to have to hold another election. So some of the people who voted said they were against the passage of the Act but were voting for it for that reason. Even the guy from Quebec who had chaired the Liberal caucus but quit that over how Trudeau had been dividing the country, Joel Lightbound, voted to approve it for that reason, despite saying he did not believe the threshold was met for the Act.

Principles? What are those?

[NOTE: The issue still needs to be voted on in the Canadian senate, but apparently that body is mostly Trudeau-supporting and so it is expected it will pass handily.]

Tyranny creep: Canada and elsewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter John Tyler asks:

There never is a shortage of jack-booted enforcers to impose a government’s will upon the citizenry.
This time Canada is the venue.

So, ladies and gents, what is about the Canadian personality or culture that enables a Trudeau (or a Putin, Bidet , Maduro, Castro, Hitler, Stalin, et. al.) to impose draconian measures to assert total control; eh?

I’m not sure whether John Tyler actually thinks there is any special characteristic of “the Canadian personality or culture” that predisposes it to this, or whether he’s being sarcastic and echoing things that have been said about Germans (or other ethnic groups or cultures) during and after World War II. But I’ll tackle the question.

As previously discussed, there may be some things about Canadians that have enabled what’s been occurring there lately: their reputation for politeness, their history of not having had a revolution against the British, and the influx of American Tories escaping from our own revolution several centuries ago. But although perhaps that gives Canada a slight edge in the race to the tyrannical bottom, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as the nature of tyranny itself in our modern internet age.

Tyranny sometimes announces itself with a bang, but more often it’s a whimper. Something that most people don’t even notice can be a turning point.

For example, Canada has hate speech laws. These are always a step towards tyranny, and a particularly “soft” one that most people may not recognize as such. After all, what decent person can be against hating hatred? (Note the ironic contradiction there). But a person can certainly dislike the sentiment expressed by someone while defending that person’s right to say it without fear of being charged with a crime. In fact, that used to be a mainstream idea taught to all children in the form of, “I may not agree with you or like what you’re saying, but I defend your right to say it.”

The left used to champion that thought when they were the ones whose rights it defended, but once the left got in the driver’s seat it was flipped to: “hate speech is violence.” The left is patient, and has been working for most of my lifetime and even earlier in Western countries in order to finally reach a tipping point in various powerful institutions in those countries. The most important of those institutions has always been education, because once leftist doctrines and teachings have replaced the old-fashioned sort based on natural rights and liberty, the ground has been prepared for the tyrannical takeover. That takeover needn’t be obviously harsh. It can be accomplished through a series of subtler steps over time – and then the sudden shift to more hardball tactics such as what we’re seeing now in Canada’s state of emergency.

Do the people of Canada realize what’s happening? Some must, and some of those approve of it. After all, order has been restored. Those pesky white supremacist [sic] truckers who wanted to disrupt the wonderful Canadian social order have been put in their place. And for some of them, “their place” is prison without bail, as well as a frozen bank account. The terrible terrible crime of which they’re guilty? “Counselling to commit mischief.”

I submit that any country or province or state that has criminalized “counselling to commit mischief” is already lost, whether the citizens of that place realize it or not.

It’s a failing to which all humans, in any country, are susceptible. Yes, some are more susceptible than others, but all are vulnerable because of human traits we share. That’s why liberty and its value must be guarded and nurtured and taught and demonstrated to every generation.

As the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov said (in this passage he is addressing Christ, who has returned to earth):

Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

Why Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act is illegitimate, and why Parliament may vote for it anyway

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to write a post about the topic that’s the subject of this post, but it would have taken me quite some time to study the wording of the Act and the wording Trudeau’s government employed when it claimed the right to use it. Instead, I happened across this rather short video in which Bruce Pardy, who is a professor at Queen’s University, explains it clearly and succinctly. So I’ll defer to him:

One of the points I was planning to make, and one that Pardy covers, is how the pernicious “words are violence” managed to morph from the confinement of the absurd “logic” of the leftist academy into the real world of politics and to restrict people’s ability to live in liberty.

Trudeau is bold and shameless. His claim that the truckers and their supporters are white supremacist haters was never supported by facts, but that didn’t stop him because he always knew it was a necessary claim to make in order to seize enormous powers. I believe this was part of his plan from the start, and he used January 6th as the template and then extended it even further.

Tonight the Canadian Parliament will be voting on the Act’s use by Trudeau [emphasis mine]:

MPs will vote on the motion Monday at 8 p.m. ET, and it is expected to pass with the joint support of the Liberals and NDP. The Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives are against it.

Trudeau’s government is a minority government, formed by a coalition of those first two parties: Liberals and NDP.

If the motion fails, the invocation of the act and its extraordinary powers will be struck down. If it passes they will remain in place until mid-March at the latest.

MPs have been debating the measure since Thursday morning, though the 15 hours of debate planned for Friday were cancelled due to safety concerns as police moved in to remove protesters still blockading the streets outside…

…Ontario Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu said on Twitter Sunday the Liberals should rein their use of the act back in now that the demonstrations appear to be over.

“If it was just about clearing the blockage and not about a power grab and government overreach, the Liberals would rescind these measures,” she said.

…Regardless of what happens with the vote, there will be an inquiry to review its use. A report must be tabled in both the House of Commons and the Senate by next February.

The Senate must also vote on the act’s use, but debate has not started yet in that chamber.

My sense is that the majority of Canadians favor its use. Canada would rather have “order” than liberty. I’m saying this not just because of the polls, but from a perusal of a lot of Twitter comments from Canadians profusely thanking both Trudeau and his deputy prime minister Freeland for “restoring order.”

Of course, that may not be the true picture, because many of the people who are against it may be too frightened to openly declare their position at this point. That’s how tyranny works to stifle dissent.

Presidents’ Day poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.]

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large load of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Lia Thomas story is one of the best examples of the insanity of our age. I have no trouble with voluntarily calling Thomas “she” if that’s what she wants. But she should never be competing against biological women in a swimming competition. She was a fair but nothing-special college swimmer when she competed as a male, but she’s cruising to victory in the women’s field, hardly seeming to need to even put out much effort.

If you click on that link, you’ll see some photos that illustrate the advantages of a male body (which is what she has, having gone through male puberty quite some times ago) in that sort of sport and in fact in most sports. That’s why we have male and female categories that are separate, something like weight classes in boxing.

Here’s one of those photos of Lia Thomas:

(2) Another fake hate crime.

(3) Meanwhile, enemies take advantage of Biden’s weakness. I say “weakness.” But actually, it might just be the natural and purposeful continuation of Obama’s foreign policy. Actually, I’d say it’s both.

The Iran deal redux.

(4) The latest Ukraine/Russia news:

The Kremlin, in a statement, said Russian President Vladimir Putin in the “near future” will recognize the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic regions in eastern Ukraine.

“Today, the leadership of the DPR and LPR received appeals to recognize their sovereignty in connection with the military aggression of the Ukrainian authorities, massive shelling of the territory of Donbas, as a result of which the civilian population suffers,” the Kremlin statement read, repeating claims of military aggression that Ukraine has repeatedly denied and disputed.

“With all this in mind, the President of Russia said that he intended to sign a corresponding decree in the near future,” the statement read, adding that the “President of France and the Federal Chancellor of Germany expressed their disappointment with this development.”

The CDC and misinformation

The New Neo Posted on by

The CDC withholds some statistics because it’s afraid the information will be turned into disinformation by the readers.

Now, there’s a great way to gain people’s trust: withhold information because you think they’re stupid.

The funny thing – I mean the sad thing – is that many people have rightly come to distrust the bobbing, weaving, cagy, withholding, mind-changing, perhaps-colluding-with-China CDC, and that this distrust is partly what leads these people to interpret each nugget of CDC’s information in the worst possible light. And yes, some of these people don’t understand statistics and misinterpret the significance of what they’re reading; that’s true for the public in general, pro-CDC and con-CDC. Statistics are inherently difficult and research on human subjects is especially difficult to interpret, and it takes a lot of math and logic to understand.

But if the CDC had been straight with us from the start, I think things would have been a great deal better.For example – I was thinking today about how, at the beginning, we were told to wash our food and/or the plastic containers it came in, and to let paper packages sit somewhere for a day or so without using them. A lot of people never did that – too much of a pain in the butt – but many did.

I did it for quite some time, waiting for further word from the CDC about whether it was necessary. I was expecting some research and a big announcement, but it never came. By the fall of 2020 you could find articles like this that said “You don’t need to bother anymore – probably.” But I recall that you had to search for the information and the news didn’t reach a lot o people. Somewhere along the line I had stopped on my own; just got tired of it and by then the huge scare at the beginning had mostly died down. How many continued with the virtually useless and yet tremendously annoying task?

And of course the CDC’s near-constant do-si-do-ing around masks was a huge generator of distrust, as is the “from COVID versus with COVID” death statistics controversy.

So if the CDC is so very wary of people receiving or generating misinformation/disinformation, why has the CDC itself put out so much? That question is a variation on the old fools/knaves theme, and your answer depends on whether you think the CDC is composed of fools, knaves, or both, and how much you think their COVID reaction has to do with The Great Reset.

Notes from Chairman Trudeau

The New Neo Posted on by

From the mouth of Justin Trudeau, December of 2020 [emphasis mine]:

India has denounced Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “ill-informed” remarks regarding an ongoing farmers’ protest in India’s capital.

Mr Trudeau and Conservative opposition leader Erin O’Toole both made comments this week expressing concern over India’s response to the demonstrations.

“Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest,” Mr Trudeau said on Monday.

Thousands of farmers have travelled to Delhi to protest agricultural reforms.

I’m afraid “always” doesn’t mean what we used to think it did. Of course, when politicians say it, the listener needs to take it with a grain of salt. And when Justin Trudeau says it, it has no meaning at all.

Ah – but it’s not peaceful protest when the protest is against something Trudeau himself has done, and when a couple of (possibly astroturfing) protestors among many thousands display a Nazi symbol. Then it justifies a harsh crackdown.

Open thread 2/21/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau had one of the most beautiful voices in the world. Maybe the most beautiful. I don’t even like lieder very much, and he sang a whole lotta lieder. But I don’t really care what he sang; he always sounded so gorgeous.

I was introduced to Fischer-Dieskau through – of course! – a recording of him as the Father in “Hansel and Gretel.” His Wiki entry doesn’t even mention the role, but to me he was superb in that opera. Here he is:

Two random facts:

[Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943] he was captured in Italy in 1945 and spent two years as an American prisoner of war. During that time, he sang Lieder in POW camps to homesick German soldiers.

Fischer-Dieskau smoked during a large part of his career. In an interview with B.Z.-News aus Berlin in 2002 he said, “I quit smoking 20 years ago. I smoked for 35 years, and then stopped in a single day.”

The missing “J”

The New Neo Posted on by

For most of my life I never had any interest in genealogy, although I did have an interest in family stories. And it was the family story of a long-lost great-uncle, a mystery I wanted to solve, that propelled me into genealogy research on my own family.

I solved it, and more. I found present-day relatives I became friendly with. I found out the story of the uncle (and his son, who is still alive at almost 100 years of age and about whose existence I’d previously known nothing). I found out about some long-ago philandering ancestors and love children. I found scandalous stories of certain rich ancestors, tales of gossip published in the NY Times that would do nicely in today’s tabloid papers. I found that my mother and grandmother’s family stories were all true, at least the ones I could document. I found that family members on both sides were heavily involved in raising, trading, and training horses, for hundreds of years. That was almost the oddest of all; my interest in horses has been close to zero.

And so I’ve found it a lot more rewarding than expected. But I still wonder why we should care. The stories we learn are so few and so incomplete compared to the vast amount we don’t know. It always perturbs me to find a relative about whom all I can glean are birthdate, marriage date, names of children, and death date – an entire life neatly encapsulated and researched in just a few minutes. The joys and sorrows all lost or imagined, the names unfamiliar, the places unknown.

On one side of my family I’m in possession of many artifacts, including two embroidered samplers. They are fragile and in small frames. They’re not museum quality or anything close to it, but they were made by my maternal great-grandmother and they carry her name and the date of 1861, which meant she was approximately eight years old.

Something that always mystified me, from the time I first saw them when I was a child, was the fact that both samplers omitted the letter “J” from the alphabet. No one could tell me why. It made no sense to me that my great-grandmother had just forgotten the letter; the samplers were carefully stitched. But then it occurred to me to do a search online, and I came up with this:

Many samplers, dated well into the nineteenth century, seem to be missing the letter “J”. Actually, the “J” is a relatively young letter, coming into common usage sometime after 1820. Young needleworkers, such at Katy Bemis, were stitching the alphabet as they knew and used it . . . without considering the “J” as an individual letter.

We also have this:

One explanation is that some of the very early samplers reflected the Elizabethan time (1558-1603) when the alphabet was comprised of 24 letters. Another shortened alphabet, about that same time, included just 21 letters, dropping the W, X, and Y as well. What’s more, U and V were sometimes shaped alike and thus not duplicated on samplers. Additionally, Dutch and German samplers sometimes reflect an early Latin alphabet that did not include J, V or W.

My great-grandmother was born in Germany.

Another mystery solved, which to me is a great satisfaction.

“Once I built a railroad” – The Bonus Army and the On-to Ottawa Trek

The New Neo Posted on by

What went on in this country post-January 6th, and what’s going on in Canada now, have historical precedents not just in repressive dictatorships but even in the US and Canada. It seems that the authorities are always frightened of demonstrations by the proles if the proles are in disagreement with that government. I mean, look what happened in France some centuries back, and in Russia about a hundred years ago.

The historic precedents I’m thinking about, though, occurred in the US and Canada during the early 1930s and the Depression, when many working people became desperate for obvious reasons. I already had been aware of the US movement known as the Bonus Army, but I just learned about the Canadian event called the On-to-Ottawa trek.

Let’s take the Bonus marchers first. They were World War I veterans who had been voted bonuses by Congress for fighting in the war, but the money was going to be paid them in 1945 and they felt they needed it now. They were about 10,000 of them, and they came to DC in 1932 and set up several camps of makeshift huts in less inhabited areas, in many cases bringing their families. They were accused of being Communists, and there definitely were Communist infiltrators among them, but the vast majority were not Communists and they ousted Communists when they found them.

Then:

On July 28, under prodding from the Herbert Hoover, the D.C. Commissioners ordered Pelham D Glassford to clear their buildings, rather than letting the protesters drift away as he had previously recommended. When the veterans rioted, an officer (George Shinault) drew his revolver and shot at the veterans, two of whom, William Hushka and Eric Carlson, died later.

Both are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, by the way.

Later the army cleared out the main camp, with some familiar names in charge [emphasis mine]:

At 4:45 pm. commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment, Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M1917 light tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch. The Bonus Marchers, believing the troops were marching in their honor, cheered the troops until Patton ordered the cavalry to charge them, which prompted the spectators to yell, “Shame! Shame!”

After the cavalry charged, the infantry, with fixed bayonets and tear gas (adamsite, an arsenical vomiting agent) entered the camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River to their largest camp, and Hoover ordered the assault stopped. MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack, claiming that the Bonus March was an attempt to overthrow the US government. 55 veterans were injured and 135 arrested…

During the military operation, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower…served as one of MacArthur’s junior aides. Believing it wrong for the Army’s highest-ranking officer to lead an action against fellow American war veterans, he strongly advised MacArthur against taking any public role: “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there,” he said later. “I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.” Despite his misgivings, Eisenhower wrote the Army’s official incident report that endorsed MacArthur’s conduct.

…The shacks in the Anacostia Camp were then set on fire, although who set them on fire is somewhat unclear.

Historians think that the unpopular action contributed to Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 election. But, since nothing had been resolved concerning the bonuses, there was another march when Roosevelt was president. He handled it differently:

During the presidential campaign of 1932, Roosevelt had opposed the veterans’ bonus demands. A second bonus march planned for the following year in May by the “National Liaison Committee of Washington,” disavowed by the previous year’s bonus army leadership, demanded that the Federal government provide marchers housing and food during their stay in the capital. Despite his opposition to the marchers’ demand for immediate payment of the bonus, Roosevelt greeted them quite differently than Hoover had done. The administration set up a special camp for the marchers at Fort Hunt, Virginia, providing forty field kitchens serving three meals a day, bus transportation to and from the capital, and entertainment in the form of military bands.

Administration officials, led by presidential confidant Louis Howe, tried to negotiate an end to the protest. Roosevelt arranged for his wife, Eleanor, to visit the site unaccompanied. She lunched with the veterans and listened to them perform songs. She reminisced about her memories of seeing troops off to World War I and welcoming them home. The most that she could offer was a promise of positions in the newly created Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). One veteran commented, “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” In a press conference following her visit, the First Lady described her reception as courteous and praised the marchers, highlighting how comfortable she felt despite critics of the marchers who described them as communists and criminals.

FDR had more of the populist touch. In 1936, the heavily Democratic Congress voted to pay the veterans their bonuses, FDR vetoed the bill, and Congress overrode the veto.

So now, on to Canada. Here’s an account of the Canadian incident I’ve never heard about before. In this case, the demonstrators were more violent than either the Bonus Army or today’s present-day Freedom Convoy (which has been remarkably peaceful; not that that has protected them from the Trudeau government and media claiming otherwise). However, from what I’ve read, it seems that the Canadian demonstrators’ violence in the 1930s incident was sparked by the police initiating violence against them:

The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government ordered the Department of National Defence to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The men in the relief camps were living in poor conditions with very low wages. The men decided to unite and in 1933, and led by Arthur “Slim” Evans the men created Workers’ Unity League (WUL). The Workers’ Unity League helped the men organize the Relief Camp Workers’ Union…

About 1,000 strikers headed for Ottawa. The strikers’ demands were: wages of 50 cents an hour for unskilled work, union wages for skilled, at least 120 hours of work a month, the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers, recognition of democratically elected workers’ committees, that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in elections, and the camps be removed from the purview of the Department of National Defence. Public support for the men was enormous, but the municipal, provincial and federal governments passed responsibility between themselves. They then decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men began boarding boxcars headed east in what became known as the “On-to-Ottawa Trek”.

They ended up stopping in Regina. But negotiations with the government didn’t work out, and then [emphasis mine]:

At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown, and the police charged the crowd with batons from all four sides. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then started to use tear gas and fired guns….The battle continued in the surrounding streets for six hours.

Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted, they were burned. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally, the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.

When it was over, 140 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Miller, a plainclothes policeman, died, and Nick Schaack, a Trekker, later died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. There were hundreds of injured residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to a hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable.

…The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. News of the police-instigated riot was front-page news across Canada….

…During the lengthy trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as “not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government.”

In the 1930s, the demonstrations both in the US and Canada were supported by the left as well as much of the populace, and the governments in question (both Bennett’s and Hoover’s, that is) were more from the right. Nowadays, in both Canada and the US, it’s mostly the right that is demonstrating against the control exercised by leftist governments (or in the case of January 6th, against a perceived fraudulent takeover by a leftist government).

And just as with Hoover in the US and the election of FDR, the conservative Bennett of Canada felt the political repercussions:

The events helped to discredit Bennett’s Conservative government, and in the 1935 federal election, his party went from holding 135 seats to just 39. After the Trek, the Saskatchewan government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the west. The camps were soon dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces, and that paid the men slightly more for their labor than the earlier camps. Although the Trek did not reach Ottawa, its reverberations certainly did. Several demands of the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the Trek set the tone for the social and welfare provisions of the postwar era.

In other words, Canada and the US veered to the left after these incidents, in part as a result of government heavy-handedness on the part of the right. Will history repeat itself – or at least rhyme – only this time with the parties reversed?

[NOTE: The title of this post quotes a line from the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It came out in 1932, and there are references to the Bonus Army without actually naming them outright:

Once in khaki suits
Gee, we looked swell
Full of that yankee Doodle De Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
I was the kid with the drum
Say don’t you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say don’t you remember, I’m your pal!
Brother can you spare a dime?

The song’s lyrics were written by two socialists. There were a lot of people turning to socialism back then, because the Depression caused a lot of doubt about capitalism.]

Police on horseback against the truckers in Canada

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, one thing is settled – sufficient numbers of police in Canada are cooperating with the arrests of the demonstrators, and so it is being accomplished. For a populist movement like that of the truckers to succeed, it either has to get big enough to overwhelm the authorities, or the alternative is that the authorities’ enforcers – that is, the police and/or army – have to refuse to cooperate with the roundup and thus prevent it from happening.

Neither of these things have occurred so far. And I doubt they will occur, because public opinion in Canada – according to polls, anyway – seems to be mainly against the truckers. Perhaps that’s the result of the effectiveness of government propaganda combined with the general Canadian tendency towards compliance and obedience and not liking to make a fuss.

Horses are sometimes used in a responsible manner for crowd control. But the police have to know exactly what they’re doing and control the horses, as well. In Ottawa, we have the story and video of police on horseback charging into the crowd of peaceful protestors and knocking down two people, one a woman with a walker. There were some reports that she was killed, but they don’t appear to be true. On the other hand, authorities’ excuses that someone threw a bicycle and spooked the horse also don’t appear to be true.

In the usual irony, the same people who were so incensed by fake reports of border guards on horseback using whips on people trying to cross our southern border illegally seem quite unperturbed by Canadian officers on horseback mowing down people not too far from our northern border.