Canada

As a six-day old blockade of North America’s busiest trade corridor ended on Sunday, Canadians voiced questions on policing tactics used to quell the demonstrations in the border city of Windsor and in Ottawa where protests entered a third week.

The “Freedom Convoy” protests, started by Canadian truckers opposing a vaccinate-or-quarantine mandate for cross-border drivers, have turned into a rallying point for people opposing the policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s government, covering everything from pandemic restrictions to a carbon tax.

The “Defund Police” set are demanding a tougher police response. Go figure.

Update CBC says Trudeauscu invoking “Emergencies Act”

UPDATE: CBC News has learned Justin Trudeau will inform the provinces he will invoke the Emergencies Act to give the government extra powers to deal with the protests across the country. Trudeau said there were no plans to deploy the military. https://t.co/yFw9Hj1DhD

— CBC News (@CBCNews) February 14, 2022

Blair described the attitude around invoking the Emergencies Act, which has never been implemented before, as “appropriate caution” rather than “reticence.”

The law gives the federal government carte blanche to cope with a crisis.

The legislation, which replaced the War Measures Act, defines a national emergency as a temporary “urgent and critical situation” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.”

This government is done. Canada has begun to resemble the old Soviet Union just before the wall came down. But their dictators were less egomaniacal than Junior.

After laying off a third of its workforce over vaccine mandates and receiving $187.5 million in pandemic bailouts, VIA Rail is now asking the federal government for more taxpayers’ money,

It is an open secret in Canada that the Conservative Party is dead in the water or, at any rate, in total disarray. Its last two leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, were political duds who would not recognize a conservative principle if it held a gun to their heads, and both had to resign in disgrace for scuttling the Party’s electoral chances. Over the last two electoral cycles, the Party itself has posed no threat to the governing Liberals or to their petulant, adolescent leader Justin Trudeau—whom Jordan Peterson aptly called a “teenager”—a prime minister who, though triply vaccinated, tested positive for Covid while hectoring others to get vaccinated. The contradictions escaped him perfectly. The Conservatives had as little to say about this glaring instance of mental scotoma as they did about the fact that the nation’s leader went into hiding rather than face the truckers’ Freedom Convoy when it arrived in Ottawa.