The willingness of Canada’s thug-in-chief to so obnoxiously penalize protest — for one, “de-banking” trucker-protesters and supporters alike without even fake court orders — has shocked many of civilized sensibility.
Shouldn’t be surprising, though. It’s nothing new either in Justin Trudeau’s conduct or in that of Western governments. (The Canadian parliament has now endorsed the crackdown.)
David Solway reports that Trudeau’s reign has long been blighted by tyrannical policies as well as by overt sympathy for terrorists, dictators, and dictatorship.
And Glenn Greenwald observes that it has become standard in the West for many “who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists [to] wield the defining weapons of despotism” — weapons like squelching dissent (directly or indirectly by enlisting private firms to function as agents of repression) and punishing dissenters without trial.
Greenwald relates the example of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. When the U.S. government found no way to criminally charge him, it pressured firms to terminate his financial accounts and kick WikiLeaks off private servers.
Such tactics as pressuring, or ordering, companies to censor and financially ostracize political opponents “without a whiff of due process” are now part of the standard governmental toolkit.
The scale on which Trudeau has been doing this, and the flagrancy of it, may seem new in North America. But he is relying on well-established precedent. Pre-pandemic precedent.
But the framework for opposing this new authoritarianism has more precedent. Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, has rightly sued Trudeau and the Canadian government for abuse of authority in resorting to emergency powers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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