When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared last month that truckers protesting his Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Ottawa hold
he accentuated the real reason the drivers decided they had no choice but to go to the streets. Their government, headed by the Liberal Party, has become decidedly illiberal.
The truckers, engaged largely in peaceful acts of civil disobedience, call themselves the Freedom Convoy. But they aren’t an organized group with a leader. Some set out from western Canada last month in opposition to a vaccine mandate. Along the way others joined the original pack in person, in spirit—and even in solidarity. On Feb. 8, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
reported “the tow trucks operators on contract to the City of Ottawa [were] taking a hard pass on requests to haul vehicles out of protest areas, according to the city’s top public servant.”
Note that Mr. Trudeau didn’t say that blocking the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is unacceptable. Rather, he declared truckers’ ideals beyond the pale.
Intolerance is ugly. But for Mr. Trudeau, who proudly backs Black Lives Matter, it’s OK in this case because it’s the politically correct variety: He’s denouncing the opinions of a bunch of yahoos.
Coming from a prime minister sitting atop a powerful administrative state, this goes a long way in explaining what has gone from a protest to a movement.
Polls suggest that most Canadians don’t support disturbing the peace or blocking international crossings. Yet a
majority are sympathetic to the truckers’ mission, which is to end Covid-19 restrictions and mandates that they believe go beyond the proper power of the state.
A moving
speech in November by former Royal Canadian Mounted Police Corporal Daniel Bulford, once assigned to Mr. Trudeau’s personal security detail, described the conflict between government Covid-19 orders and the oath Mounties take to defend Canadian liberty.
Mr. Trudeau likes to invoke “science.” Yet the virulence of the virus is waning, natural immunity is up, and by the prime minister’s own estimates some 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated. If there were ever any reasons for extraordinary government measures to protect public health, they too have faded.
On Tuesday Alberta Premier Jason Kenney
lifted his province’s proof-of-vaccination requirements. “Now is the time to begin learning to live with Covid,” he said. “These restrictions have led to terrible division.” Saskatchewan did the same earlier last week, and Ontario has
said it would move in a similar direction.
Meantime, Mr. Trudeau is claiming police powers as if the nation were in the grip of catastrophe. No wonder already simmering resentments about federal overreach have boiled over.
Canada is advertised as a modern democracy that respects pluralism. This implies differences of opinion peacefully coexisting on a variety of subjects from assessing health risks to raising and educating children to political philosophy. Individuals, even when in the minority, retain rights to free speech and assembly.
Yet in practice Canadians who oppose big government increasingly find they are living under a woke, progressive majoritarianism that believes it owns the truth. Dissidents are hounded out of the public square and even the prime minister cancels contrarians without batting an eye.
The reach of Canada’s administrative state rivals that of its southern neighbor. Ottawa and the provinces have their own versions of health departments and agencies staffed with “experts” who wield enormous power yet don’t answer to the electorate. On both sides of the border, chief medical authorities are referred to as “top doctors,” but that’s a misnomer. They’re more likely to be top bureaucrats, people like Anthony Fauci, who has been at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
In theory, Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms—which is part of the constitution—ought to protect civil rights. But the Canadian judiciary has been drifting ideologically left for decades. Courts today interpret the constitution through the lens of social justice rather than individual liberty. The state enjoys wide powers to crush dissent.
The government claims its Covid-19 restrictions do not limit freedom, but that’s a phony argument. As Bruce Pardy, the executive director of Rights Probe, a Toronto-based think tank,
explained in the Financial Post Nov. 3, “By maintaining the pretense that people have a real choice between being vaccinated or being stripped of their employment, schooling, social interactions and travels, governments seek to coerce and manipulate without triggering charter protections.”
Mr. Pardy told me by telephone last week that he believes “the instincts of small-c conservatives are to protect institutions. But they don’t realize that those institutions are gone. They still have faith in a system of governance already compromised.”
The truckers know better.
"Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern in particular have been exposed as the real Covid extremists, tearing their societies apart with divisive mandates and draconian restrictions no longer backed up by scientific evidence.... At the forefront of this hypocrisy are Canada's Trudeau and New Zealand's Ardern, Prime Ministers whose 'Be Kind' mantras are being exposed as meaningless drivel. It's this pair of lefties who are the nasty ones, doing all they can to drive a wedge through their once harmonious and quiet societies ..."
