Trudeau revokes emergency powers
This news just broke. I may revisit this story later tonight when I have more information:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday he is removing emergency powers police can use after authorities ended the border blockades by those opposed to COVID-19 restrictions as well as the occupation of downtown Ottawa.
Trudeau invoked the powers last week and lawmakers affirmed the powers late Monday. Trudeau said then the powers were still needed but noted they would not stay in place a day longer than necessary.
“The situation is no longer an emergency, therefore the federal government will be ending the use of the emergencies act,” Trudeau said. “We are confident that existing laws and bylaws are sufficient to keep people safe.”
But it wasn’t needed at all in the first place; the police could have handled it without any special declarations. And it certainly wasn’t needed on Monday, when that vote took place. Will Trudeau now drop the charges against those arrested or imprisoned? I doubt it. Will he unfreeze bank accounts? I don’t know, but I have my doubts about that as well.
Did Trudeau plan from the start to declare the emergency in order to get the power to do these things and show who’s boss, scare the opposition and anyone who might support them, and then magnanimously and with a big show of his great dedication to liberty declare the crisis over and get plaudits for that? In other words, a few days of such powers accomplished all his ends. He served notice on the Canadian people to beware his power, and that was his real goal: to have a chilling effect on protest from the right (again, just as with January 6th and the treatment the demonstrators received in the US from the Biden administration and the press).
And what of the vote Monday in Parliament? Why did he let that charade go on? I think that’s somewhat obvious as well. There was no emergency anymore when it was taking place, but he wanted the vote as a substitute for a new election, which he might have lost. He knew the House would support him and he wanted to demonstrate his domination over them, and he also wanted to show that he had a mandate to do whatever he wanted at any time.
Did he withdraw the emergency powers because the Senate might not have approved? I supposed that’s possible, but I doubt it. I think what’s going on is that he had accomplished his goals spectacularly (for example, he has the names of everyone who contributed to the convoy) and he felt it was time to pretend to be far more moderate than he is. Polls becoming more negative towards him as time went on might have been a factor, as well.
Trudeau may seem dumb. But like most people who get where he is, he’s very canny and that is a form of intelligence. I absolutely would not underestimate this man.
Walter Williams on liberty
This is more important than ever, and more timely. I believe this interview occurred in early 2018:
A detransitioner describes some of her original motives for transitioning
The following wasn’t her only motive. But this was certainly part of why transitioning appealed to her as a troubled teenager, and I strongly suspect it’s a common motivation for today’s teenagers.
A few years ago the author was a somewhat depressed, isolated and troubled teenage girl who turned to the internet for information and companionship, and became heavily involved with Tumblr:
On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.
I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!
Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too…
Teenagers are very vulnerable to that sort of group pressure, and the internet intensifies it greatly.
I said it wasn’t her only motive. Here were some others, and they are not uncommon in young girls of that age (post-pubescent teenager) today:
This is the incentive I felt to comb through my thoughts and memories for things that might be further evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl. I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends. Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women. I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing.
It’s a long article, but I found it riveting. The author, who is now in her early twenties, finally stopped taking testosterone and accepted – and is trying to embrace – her status as a heterosexual young woman. She’s a good writer, too, and obviously intelligent. And yet those things didn’t protect her from falling into a deep well from which it took a great deal of effort to emerge.
One of the worst things about her story, and the story of many others, was how every mental health and health professional with whom she interacted during that period was negligently and irresponsibly (in my opinion) and uncritically facilitating what happened to this girl. In contrast, they were singularly unsupportive when she realized that she needed to detransition back to being female. Her story is not unusual in that regard.
I’m so glad I’m not growing up today, although it would be nice to be young – nice in the abstract. But I do have grandchildren, and I do worry about the attitudes prevalent in the world surrounding them.
The Trudeau government tells the Canadian Senate, “Because, reasons!”
The Canadian Senate is deliberating the extension of the Emergencies Act activation that the House has already approved. As part of that process, debates are ongoing.
I have almost zero doubt that the Senate will be going along with the House. The body is dominated by Trudeau supporters, for one thing. But I thought I’d highlight something that emerged during the questioning of the government’s representative Marc Gold:
The senators got down to the basic question of why do you need it if the protesters are no longer camped outside of Parliament and there are no longer any blockades? What’s the point besides a huge power grab by Justin Trudeau?
They also wanted to know what intelligence or data they were basing their request for the Act on, to begin with. The government never provided that information to the Parliament. The government representative said they made the decision based on intelligence they “couldn’t share.”
“‘What is equally clear, as we all know, and as I stated in response to an earlier question, that I cannot share, and the government cannot share and should not share the intelligence that it may have received that helped inform their decision,’ he continued.”
Just trust us; we are asking for dictatorial powers for a really really good reason that must remain secret even from you, the legislators. That’s extraordinary, and no member of the legislature ought to accept it. But it’s almost a certainty that they will, they will.
And of course, as pointed out in the first paragraph of the above quote, there is no longer even the supposed (albeit extraordinarily weak) justification presented by the blockade and the demonstration. That’s why Trudeau’s government must invent a secret justification That Cannot Be Told. And that reason is expected to last a long time, because you just never know when those awful white supremacist Nazis will decide to demonstrate again.
It is impressive in its audacity. But for quite some time now the left in the West has realized that there is a distinct lack of courage and/or will and/or numbers on the part of its opponents in political life, and that dedication to the protection of liberty seems to have waned remarkably even in the general population. They feel an urgency to take advantage of this moment in time and this opportunity.
Spambot of the day
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Open thread 2/23/22
I saw this as a short in a movie theater when I was a kid, and something in a recent comment thread made me think of it again:
On Biden’s weakness: Putin isn’t Corn Pop
The money angle on Putin and Ukraine:
Before Biden became President, the U.S. was energy independent and an exporter of energy. [Biden lowered] American production and remov[ed] Trump’s restrictions on the Nordstream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. His policies made other countries more reliant on Russian gas…[g]iving Putin leverage on other countries such as Germany and doubling the price. All that extra money went straight into Russia’s pockets. Those new profits helped Russia raise the funds to continue Putin’s dream of the greater Russia of the USSR.
On top of the higher prices and the increased dependence on Russian energy, the mishandling of the Afghan withdrawal and removing some of the Iran sanctions showed Biden to be a weak President. Putin is no idiot. All of Biden’s flawed policies and feeble foreign policy made the Russian president understand that if he was ever going to get Ukraine back in Russia’s clutches, this was it.
This seems pretty obvious.
How far this will go – whether it will be resolved at the last minute and both sides declare victory – I’m not sure. However, I assumed when Biden was elected that this sort of thing was going to be happening. Biden would be continuing Obama’s policies, only making it worse because we’re that much farther along on the leftist continuum and Biden is obviously confused and feeble.
More:
The White House has already ruled out sanctions on Russia for recognizing the autonomy of Donetsk and Luhansk and the peacekeepers seem to fall within the “minor incursion” parameters that Joe Biden established in January. I don’t know what level of risk the Ukrainians are willing to take by accidentally, or not, killing Russian troops. I’d just note that under the UN “peacekeeping” definition, both sides have to agree to a ceasefire before deployment. That hasn’t happened in this case which leads one to believe that the primary purpose of the Russian troops is to get some of them killed. So we haven’t seen the last of this melodrama.
Putin has created an “invasion-in-being.” In naval warfare, the analogous concept of a “fleet in being” is a force that projects menace without ever leaving port. Were it to fight it might lose and no longer influence but while it remains in port, one is forced to guard against it…
…[T]here is no way of telling whether this or that stand-to is the real thing because to be credible, it must always be potentially real…
Being an ex secret policeman, Putin knows much of his menace comes from unpredictability. The public can tolerate ordinary police because they know what the rules are and do not anticipate a midnight knock on the door. As with secret police, Ukraine and the Western public don’t know what the rules are. They are hanging on the caprice of a seeming madman, who curiously keeps going to the brink without crossing it for good reason; if he actually invades in a recognizable way the uncertainty is removed and the West knows what to do about aging overreaching dictators who’ve started something they can’t afford. By preserving ambiguity Putin has Biden spellbound, on the one hand reportedly convinced it’s on.
“Peacekeeping” forces? Whatever Putin calls them, what will they actually be doing?
On the other hand, Biden seems to think Putin can still be talked out of it. The wires announced a breakthrough summit brokered by French President Emmanuel Macron in which “President Biden has agreed ‘in principle’ to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the near future, provided Russia has not invaded Ukraine, the White House announced.” Taking all the elements together it seems, according to a former White House adviser, that “ultimately Putin wants some kind of deal. They think Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.” Perhaps Putin’s first choice in the Ukraine crisis was always a deal.
Who knew the White House had such a sense of humor? “[Putin thinks] Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.”
Not the kind of deal Putin wanted, anyway.
Canada’s Parliament votes to extend the Emergencies Act for 30 days
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.
That’s ?? @JoelLightbound joins @beynate in saying he is only voting with the government on the #EmergenciesAct because it is a confidence vote. @JustinTrudeau doesn't have the support of a majority of MPs and so is using the threat of an election to get his way. #cdnpoli
— Melissa Lantsman (@MelissaLantsman) February 21, 2022
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
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!
Open thread 2/22/22
A whole lot of 2s up there today.
Why Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act is illegitimate, and why Parliament may vote for it anyway
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.