Meet the new Canada, a bit more like Beijing than the old Canada
On the Globe report heard 'round the world, the inevitable impropriety embedded within Justice Rouleau's POEC ruling, and where that leaves a nation once known for peace, order, and good government.
It’s not as if the warning signs weren’t there.
“You have no idea how bad the problem is,” a government official told me years ago.
“We can’t talk about it, but there’s a reason that Five Eyes doesn’t trust us with sh*t,” said another.
“The doctor told me to stop putting crayons up my nose,” said Mark Gerretsen. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself. But the first two quotes are real.)
Terry Glavin has been all over the China file for years.
The secretive dealings between the Liberals and the CCP weren’t all that secret. But with enough strategic amnesia, and a large portion of the corporate press in their pocket, it had been made manageable to keep Canadians in the dark on matters shocking enough to induce a Kai Tak heart attack.
Trudeau, ever-slippery in moments of democratic accountability, had scheduled a travel day for today of all days. The expected Public Order Emergency Commission ruling was one thing, but they most surely knew of Bob Fife and Steven Chase’s latest bombshell that was coming down the pipe.
Here at Acceptable Views, we’re not in the government coincidence business. There’s also a reason Canada’s self-admitted far-left activist zine felt compelled to launder another round of lazy ‘Russian disinformation’ reporting against Freedom Convoy protesters not one day before. For every action that threatens a Liberal in power, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
And let’s not lose sight of what our Pulitzer Prize winners have said about the disinformation racket:
Leaving aside Canada’s ample-bosomed ‘speak power to truth’ industry, Beijing’s work to help a sitting Canadian Prime Minister eke out what is likely one last minority government is indeed a big deal. The biggest of deals, actually. And the public cannot afford for it to disappear down the memory hole after an oddly timed Friday news dump going into a long weekend.
For all that fans of Beijing’s man in Ottawa love to hoot and holler about disinformation as defined by speech and criticism they disagree with politically, a foreign power run by genocidal, authoritarian hypochondriacs has been meddling in the election sanctity they claim to care about when they’re down in the polls.
Per CSIS’s findings:
Beijing had joint goals — defeat the tougher-on-China Conservatives, while returning the subservient and malleable Trudeau to minority power.
Use their shadow networks within Canada to spread actual disinformation against Conservatives in close ridings (generally those with large Chinese populations, obviously).
Leverage undeclared cash donations as a means of furnishing Liberal candidates.
Better governments have fallen for less — which again places the ever-unserious Jagmeet Singh in the crosshairs of that which he is pathologically averse to handling: a direct question about his role in propping up an increasingly-corrupt, out-of-touch, and practically checked-out group of ideologues who only show the mildest of contrition when caught, and who have been tied in knots over the selling of multiple lame-duck policies of managed decline.
We’re talking high crimes of the land here; borderline — if not outright — treason. Singh can’t so easily launch into a non-sequitur-laden rant about grocery store executives when his dance partner has betrayed every oath of office, and put Canada’s very security at risk.
And yet, just watch him. The man knows why he’s there, and he sure as hell doesn’t care that much about dental care. It’s not like he didn’t know.
They all knew.
On any other day Friday, that would be it.
But this was no ordinary Friday in the Westernmost satellite offices of the People’s Republic.
There was still that pesky matter of dealing with those darned protesters, their formerly-thwarted hopes, freedoms, and dreams, and that whole “sorry about freezing your bank accounts and trampling you with police horses, boy, did the rest of the world not take kindly to that.”
Only, that apology never happened. And inside Canada, our state broadcasters turned Ever-Vigilant Enforcers of the Preferred Narrative never thought to even ask.
Every moment of criticism from more ethical and non-beholden individuals has been met with the kind of ruthless aggression normally reserved for an early 2000s taping of WWE Smackdown.
Be it Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, or the British press, the world took notice of the Indigenous elder tramplin’, the bruised and battered yoga teachers and light workers, and the independent journalists who were shot point blank with rubber bullets by overzealous Quebec rent-a-riot-cops, as well as pepper-sprayed for the indiscretion of standing-while-not-a-member-of-a-fragile-and-hysteric-government-class.
But they were all just ‘missing context,’ of course. The rest of the world experiences Canada’s lowest moments differently.
We may be beating our democratic protesters, and taking our marching orders from China, but at least we’re not American.
I say again, and hopefully for the last time, I never experienced the Freedom Convoy that I read about in the CBC, or in the anecdotal screeds of far-left Ottawa organizers who wear masks in their profile pictures.
Not without its faults and flaws, my overwhelming takeaway from the time spent on overpasses and on Wellington Street remains that of experiencing a big sloppy music festival, not some cosplaying version of January 6th that exists to satisfy the heroic fantasies of purple-haired Glebe denizens still waiting for their moment to shine on Libs of Tik-Tok.
And without spending too much time relitigating the nitty gritty of the Public Order Emergency Commission — of which I and others have written about more than extensively — there was still that little matter of no police or intelligence agency actually asking for the Emergencies Act, and almost all non-Trudeau, Mendicino, and moon-faced bureaucratic testimony fervently denied that anything but existing policing powers were required.
This was a failure of leadership, not of the law as written; an incitement of overwhelmingly-ordinary and peaceful people who simply couldn’t take it anymore.
Evidently, that still wasn’t enough for Justice Rouleau.
“Some things are predictable,” Bruce Pardy, Law Professor and Executive Director of Rights Probe tweeted out in the moments following Rouleau’s release of a tepid yet strangely subjective report that found the federal government acted in good faith, and somehow managed to meet the exceedingly high bar for an unprecedented wartimes Act that nearly every expert had told us they failed to meet.
While no surprise that the system chose to not eat its own — after all, the same Marco Mendicino who was caught on text message cheering for his own version of Tiananmen Square was once a crown prosecutor — the non-Tru-Anon public has been understandably met with a measure of disappointment and more questions than answers.
Certain legal experts have been far less kind:
And in the depths of the report is where many have found issues with Rouleau’s apparent application of alternative facts on behalf of the government:
While only having a few hours with the document so far, Rouleau draws incorrect conclusions from large swathes of the evidence and testimony that were left before him:
He bizarrely tries (and fails) to carry water for Trudeau’s infamous “unacceptable views” speech.
He fails to catch an outright lie in Marco Mendicino’s testimony.
He ignores that reporters were threatened for doing their jobs inside the ‘exclusion zone.’
There will be plenty for our legal and civil liberty experts to unpack in the days ahead, but perhaps what I find so striking — and perhaps fitting — is that in the end, Paul Rouleau succumbed to the same ‘feelings over facts’ approach that led to the catastrophization and overreaction to the Freedom Convoy in the first place.
The Prime Minister of Canada didn’t need Paul Rouleau’s help in explaining his deliberately inflammatory and bigoted remarks towards his citizens, much as he didn’t need the Justice to turn today into any kind of ruling.
And yet, Rouleau tries to have it both ways, claiming “other reasonable and informed people could come to a different conclusion” than him.
If only we were dealing with reasonable and informed individuals when it comes to Canada’s Liberal government, and the waning number of those who support them. Instead, we’re left with perjurers, burgeoning authoritarians, and foreign assets.
And Justice Rouleau just did that group a favour. (Especially when one considers there are still two Emergencies Act challenges underway in Federal Court, wherein the scales of justice have now been leaned on.)
“You have no idea how bad the problem is,” that government official told me years ago.
Come to think of it, we sure do.
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If it wasn’t for the truckers, Substack and Twitter we’d be doomed. Without them we’d now be being loaded onto boxcars and taken to quarantine camps quietly encouraged by the CBC and Rouleau.