Joanna Blythman: Trudeau is trying to turn Canada into an elected dictatorship

When the Canadians truckers’ Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa to demonstrate grass roots opposition to Covid mandates, he tried to mischaracterise participating citizens as a small fringe of racists, Nazis, antisemites, transphobes and homophobes with “unacceptable views”.

When that pathetic slur didn’t work, he turned even nastier.

He froze the truckers’ fighting fund, amassed in part by multiple donations from non-trucker citizens who share their sentiments. Polls show that two-thirds of Canadians are ready to drop Covid restrictions.

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So the truckers set up another fundraiser on yet another platform. He froze that also.

Their peaceful protest continued nevertheless, so then Trudeau really threw a wobbler, sending in individually unidentifiable, heavily militarised riot troops armed with batons, stun guns, and pepper spray.

In echoes of what lead to the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in the 19th century, he despatched mounted police, injuring several demonstrators including one older, first nation woman on a mobility scooter.

Even when his thuggish tactics had ‘secured’ central Ottawa, he remained twitchy.

That’s why, with a relatively narrow majority –185 to 151 – far from the consensual vote you’d expect for such a grave move, he enacted Canada’s Emergency Act. His finance minister Chrystia Freeland (the irony) even announced that the power to freeze funds would remain “permanently in place".

But the Emergency Act was previously reserved for events that threatened the very existence of the Canadian state, such as terrorism. A gathering of truckers outside parliament using non-violent civil disobedience, featuring bouncy castles and meals for the homeless, to protest state overreach and the trampling of liberties, doesn’t qualify.

In the UK, we have tolerated drawn-out disruptions in the form of Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and Insulate Britain actions. As yet, the British state doesn’t send in the shock troops when protest paralyses daily life.

Trudeau is a such a hypocrite. In 2020, he posed as a beacon of international solidarity by backing Indian farmers who protested new laws over a protracted period. "Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue,” he said.

But India held 11 rounds of talk with its protesters, arrested no-one for road blocks, and took the dispute to the courts. Trudeau, on the other hand, rejected talks with Freedom Convoy representatives and imposed a national emergency.

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With emergency law imposed, Canada had lost any semblance of being a liberal democracy. Access to your bank account could be frozen, your driving licence revoked, your insurance policies cancelled, your vehicle seized, your pets put down, and your children removed, even if you were not charged with any offence.

Already before he reached for the Emergency Act he had banned vaccine-free Canadians from travelling on trains and planes and restricted their access to grocery shopping.

If Donald Trump or Xi Jinping did what Trudeau has done in the last few weeks, we’d never hear the end of it.

In 2014, Daniel Dickin, a Canadian community activist red-flagged Trudeau in the Huffington Post: "It's becoming clearer as the days of Trudeau's Liberals wear on: if elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau would turn Canada into a dictatorship.”

An on-the-nose comment that, when Trudeau has since admitted that he "admires China's basic dictatorship" because it get things done quickly.

People who have lived under the boot of totalitarian regimes can spot his type a mile off. MEP Cristian Terhes was bang-on when he said: "He's exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He's like Ceaușescu in Romania.”

Even the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa took to Twitter this week, seeing an opportunity to improve its human rights image by comparison: “In the eyes of some people in Canada, similar protests and demonstrations should be referred to differently in different places. In Hong Kong, they are 'human rights movement', but in Canada they are 'a threat to democracy'. Such stark double standard is unacceptable.”

On Wednesday, just two days after he had defended his decision to declare an emergency, Trudeau suddenly announced that he would rescind the Emergency Act.

“Nothing has changed between Monday and today other than a flood of concerns from Canadian citizens, bad press and international ridicule,” Candice Bergen, leader of the opposition, pointed out.

Meanwhile Jason Kenny, Alberta’s Premier, is keeping up the pressure on Trudeau by backing a judicial review into the federal government's use of the legislation.

So when it looked as though Trudeau, like a furious, out-of-control toddler, would triple down and go Full Despot, the forces of reason stepped in, but one hopes that ultimately, his days in power are numbered.

Canada's lapse into state repression stands as a warning to other countries. We can’t let our leaders, Nicola Sturgeon included, normalise the idea that our civil liberties can be switched off during government-deemed emergencies.

Over the last two years, this impulse has been advanced under the false premise that suspension of key individual rights, such as bodily autonomy, rights that should be absolute, is justified as long as the benefits to the majority outweigh the costs to the minority.

Overnight we became compliant subjects of quasi-authoritarian states where crucial checks and balances long embodied in our democratic institutions were dismantled.

Trudeau appears to be using Canada as a petri dish for a global ‘Great Reset’, the technocratic takeover of world governance, as planned by his mentor Klaus Schwab, boss of the World Economic Forum, and a handful of fellow unelected, but highly influential members of the world elite.

Schwab openly boasts that WEF has “penetrated” cabinets all around the globe. Trudeau, as a WEF ‘Young Global Leader’, is his man in Ottawa. “I know half of this cabinet or even more than half..are..actually Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum”, Schwab purrs approvingly, like a doting grandparent.

Trudeau, who posed as a progressive, is living proof that you can’t judge a book by its covers.

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