The Emergencies Act was an undemocratic lie; where do we go from here?
The bill has come due for 'anti-hate' hustlers, weak-willed politicians, and dutiful media. When you try (and fail) to sell the public on a January 6th that never was, consequences will follow.
If the first few days of farcical testimony weren’t enough to convince the layman of Emergencies Act abuse, there was no escaping that reality by the end of day ten.
When the same interim police chief who struggled with the red mist during those balmy days of protest has nothing left to go on but ‘microaggressions’ and the auspice of violence as it relates to the sensibilities of those he served — and for those he laughably promised to avenge by tracking down peaceful protestors after the fact — the end is nigh for the credibility of members of an orthodoxy who so liberally borrowed from a remarkably illiberal set of powers.
The definition of words has to matter, particularly before the law. When you see liberties being taken with one so important as “violence,” we are no longer high upon a hill in the realm of peace, order, and good governance, but down in the wastewater where the Twitter poop scientists obsessively monitor for COVID-19, and where loyal-to-a-fault partisans so often do their best work.
Only this time, the Liberals were hardly sending their best. Now that they’ve been asked to show that work, there are no notes or formulas in the margins, only predetermined outcomes in desperate search of a reason why.
Beyond the realm of make-believe, the actual evidence in this case is damning, and not in the way the federal government had hoped.
Three levels of police force have admitted to never asking for the powers of the Emergencies Act.
Even the politically compromised RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki — who is at present wrapped up in an investigation that she meddled in the worst mass shooting in Canadian history on behalf of her Liberal masters — claims that not all RCMP resources were exhausted before the snap decision to enact never-before-used war measures on Canadian protestors.
Ottawa Police had tow trucks lined up and ready to deploy, the OPP were submitting reports that there was no threat to national security, and the RCMP reiterated there was no need for additional emergency powers.
Public Safety Canada had even worked up a plan to clear out the protest without the EA, and cabinet was set to meet with protestors on the day Trudeau invoked the act, and scenes of trampling and seized assets soon followed.
Yet even that doesn’t appear to be enough to shake the foundations of a Liberal-NDP pact sealed in golden parachute pensions and quasi-hush money cheques to voters (who are expected to spend the majority of those ill-gotten taxpayer gains on dental care, but for which no one in government appears particularly keen on following up about after the fact).
For any other government in our history, this is of course a scandal that sends Canadians to the polls. How foreign the situation in British parliament must look at present to a roster of Liberal MPs who are made to experience democratic norms differently on a daily basis, and who were even whipped into a vote of confidence to wrongly support the Emergencies Act.
But as we know, this is a new era of politics. Our democratic structures didn’t wholly account for the kind of bad-faith actors and victims who would plow headlong no matter the costs to national unity and the public temperament, and few could have imagined the ideological purity tests and the professionally-aggrieved Olympiads that would come to characterize the sociopolitical discourse of the early 2000s.
The defining political philosophy on the ever-encroaching fringes of the modern left now appears to be “it’s not wrong when my side does it, because we hold more symbols of virtue, and thus, legitimacy.” It may be easy to argue with the ethics of that stance; it’s harder to argue with the results.
On the right, even the dreaded Orange Man Bad deployed a similar strategy to great effect in 2016. If you’re apologizing and playing by somebody else’s rules, you’re losing. So… don’t. (A lesson that the Conservative Party of Canada will surely have to continue to adopt if they finally wish to send the Trudeau regime packing.)
Much as no amount of spin can undo what voters witnessed on stage last night in Pennsylvania, there’s no way to spin Canada’s perpetual Current Thing fiasco as anything but a deeply disingenuous scandal; one that started with scurrilous rumours and secondhand reports of “violence,” insurrection, and arson, and has ended out in the cold light of day as nothing less than a historic abuse of power.
Just as the definition of violence had to change to fit a lack thereof, “may” is all they have left. To abandon the ifs, buts, and maybes after all this time is to be culpable, and the state and its messaging apparatus don’t do culpable.
Yet for some, that bill has come due all the same.
Premier Ford can try to exercise parliamentary privilege and fight his call to testify before the eyes and ears of the nation all he likes. When you play games with people’s lives, and enable and excuse the very worst of big government overreach, that will live long enough in the memory of the actual good guys (read: the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Canadian Constitution Foundation), who will work oh-so-hard to make sure that you see your day in proverbial court, or that you are at least forced to wear a millstone of shame for fighting tooth and nail to avoid doing so.
The Trudeaus and Fords of the world may have time, whipped votes, and culpable and compromised friends in media on their side (far less so for the 'conservative’ in this equation), but we know now for certain they sure as hell don’t have the proof.
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but at least the orientation on one’s moral compass should be clear. Next time some useful idiot like Marco Mendicino opens his mouth to talk about disinformation, or a headline crosses your screen that begins with “experts warn,” start by heading in the opposite direction.
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You could write a piece on underwater basket weaving, and i would read as soon as it hits my inbox. Beautiful writing on such an ugly topic. Bravo.