When Canadian truckers first signaled their intent to assemble a Freedom Convoy protesting their government’s draconian Covid-19 policies, including vaccine mandates and passports, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blew them off as a “fringe minority.”
Just this week, however, Trudeau invoked for the first time ever the Emergencies Act, the successor law to the War Measures Act, in order to mobilize the Canadian military to crush the Freedom Convoy and forcibly clear the truckers and their rigs from the streets of Ottawa. Somehow, this “fringe minority” has prompted the most authoritarian response from a Canadian government since Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, deployed soldiers in the October Crisis of 1970 to quell an actual separatist movement, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), after it kidnapped the deputy premier of Quebec and a British diplomat.
