HURRICANE CANADA: DAVID SOLWAY
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/06/hurricane-canada-n1556770
Hurricane Canada, a category 5 political storm, has made landfall on the country’s capital city in the form of a massive truckers’ strike protesting illegal COVID mandates and vaccine passports, a phenomenon that has galvanized the attention of the world and inspired similar demonstrations internationally. This has become common knowledge, and commentary pro and con has been proliferating with abandon.
What is most surprising in a tepid and unadventurous country like Canada that habitually votes left is the degree of popular support the truckers’ Freedom Convoy has garnered from ordinary citizens across the land. Convoys have assembled in several Canadian cities, the Alberta-Montana border has been blockaded, and reinforcements continue to arrive—even on horseback, taking a page from the RCMP.
Naturally, official aggression is also formidable, as a bought-and-paid-for print media, enjoying Prime Minister Trudeau’s $600 million bribe, and the country’s national broadcaster the CBC, rolling in annual billion-dollar government funding, weigh in against the truckers. Government officials at every level, municipal, provincial, and federal, with only a few exceptions, have joined the vigilante movement against the salt-of-the-earth protesters. Threats of reprisal are mounting, highways have been closed, and the turbulence shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
Canada is now a divided country, pitting an elite class of political authorities, journalists, and haranguing pundits against a rising tide of blue-collar resentment.
How Hurricane Canada will play itself out is anybody’s guess. As of this writing, Justin Trudeau remains in hiding, prompting the popular meme: Justin Trudeau Tests Positive for Coward-19. But he has the sycophantic media and practically all the communication networks on his side. Trudeau continues to promulgate his message of lies, pietistic self-justification, and invidious calumnies against the Freedom Convoy, conduct unbefitting a national leader. With the complicity of dubious figures like the mayor and police chief of Ottawa, he may use totalitarian measures to clamp down on the truckers—in the words of chief Peter Sloly, what is needed is a “surge and contain” strategy. Furthermore, “All Ottawa police officers are to regard the protesting group as an unlawful, extremist and hate-filled mob and have a duty to comply with the instructions of the command and control structure.”
Indeed, as Sundance reports, “Chief Sloly outlined that federal intelligence authorities will be ‘collecting financial, digital, vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status and other related evidence that will be used in prosecution.’ The jackboots will focus on using acts of mischief, hate, harassment, intimidation and other threatening behaviors, whether real or created by Canadian intelligence operations, to target the protestors.”
This is a very dubious strategy and may only help to inflame public sentiment against a repressive, police-state government. Ultimately, Trudeau may have no option but to do his utmost to save face—or blackface—and preserve his dignity, though he has none to speak of. He may have no choice but to accede to the truckers’ demands and abolish the vaccine mandates and vaxxports, claiming that he was preparing to do precisely that before the truckers prevented him from relaxing or lifting the restrictions of the last two years—by forcing him to divert his attention from health policy to riot containment. He would claim that the lockdowns and mandates have been successful and, owing to the 90% nobly vaccinated among us who dutifully followed his lead, Canada is now in a position to restore normality—no thanks to the truckers but to Trudeau himself.
There is a third possibility, though a rather unlikely one. As Gateway Pundit reports, Canada’s Governor General Mary Simon is being overwhelmed by demands to remove Trudeau from office. The problem is that there is no mechanism for firing a prime minister in this country apart from a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Citizens do not vote for a prime minister but for their own local candidate. And there are no term limits on an incumbent prime minister. As Gateway rightly concludes, “Sounds a tad more communist than anything else. Canada has always been far less of a democratic nation than perceived by the public. In Justin Trudeau’s Canada, democracy is clinging by a thread.” A vote of no confidence is not in the cards, given that no political party has opposed the Liberal government’s decrees.
In any case, the hurricane will eventually pass, leaving social and political devastation in its wake. Perhaps the upshot will be something like a renewed and intensified autocratic state under the rule of a discredited, incompetent and authoritarian prime minister and a politburo of compliant apparatchiks and media fellow travelers. Or, Lord willing, something I would never have thought possible, a revived democratic polity sparked by a grassroots and courageous revolt that has shaken the Confederation to its very core. Should justice prevail, Hurricane Canada will have been a godsend.
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