https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/21/why-is-the-left-silent-on-trudeaus-crackdown/
Last month I gave a speech at the ‘Kill the Bill’ rally in Westminster, with a bunch of fellow lefties who were rightly angry at Priti Patel’s proposed Policing Bill, which would have essentially outlawed protests. Jeremy Corbyn was there (obviously), as were other well-known names from the left, many of whom I am friendly with and respect a lot. There was much impassioned rhetoric about the worrying resurgence of authoritarianism around the world.
Yet all of those speakers I demonstrated with in London have remained eerily silent on Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on the Canadian truckers’ protests (with the exception of Extinction Rebellion). As has practically every major civil-rights organisation on the planet for that matter, from the ACLU in the US to Liberty in the UK.
Over the past few weeks, Trudeau’s government has enacted emergency powers, used pepper spray and stun grenades on the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, and has labelled these legitimate protesters as ‘terrorists’, threatening to freeze their bank accounts. Had this been an equally narcissistic North American head of state – with a comparably lousy record on human rights and the environment, and whose name also begins with T – my fellow lefties probably would have had one or two things to say on Twitter. But this was Trudeau, not Trump, and so they all ignored it when GoFundMe seized $10million in legitimate donations to the truckers. They ignored it when Trudeau called a Jewish politician a Nazi sympathiser in parliament for questioning his crackdown. They ignored it when another fundraising site, GiveSendGo, was hacked, outing the names of 92,000 Freedom Convoy donors, some of whom lost their jobs as a result.