Jonathan Kay on X - "highlights from the "Ottawa People's Commission" report. Apparently, the "Battle of Billings Bridge" was like the Vimy Ridge of 2022. Also, Ottawa was *double* occupied, since the city was already occupied by settlers. And "Angry White Men" is capitalized for some reason"
Jewish group demands apology after MPs honoured man who fought for Nazis - "Several Jewish advocacy organizations condemned members of Parliament on Sunday for giving a standing ovation to a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War. During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs in the House of Commons honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who fought for the First Ukrainian Division... The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis."
Jewish group demands apology after MPs honoured man who fought for Nazis : canada - "If a single Swastika is raised at a protest, everyone at that protest is a Nazi. If a foreign government brings in a literal SS war criminal to celebrate as an exemplar, they're heroes and we need to send them weapons as quickly as possible"
The cope I see is that one person invited him so it's only his fault (apparently it's no problem for the party not to vet invitees). But clearly in a ground-up protest the left disapproves of, the whole group is responsible for the "worst" individual's behavior (even if that person might not even be part of the same protest) (ditto for the anti-gender ideology protests, where one allegation of homophobic shouting means all the protesters are homophobic, even if that's not even what the protest is about)
WARMINGTON: As two charged Freedom Convoy protesters sat in court, police helped another protest block streets - "two Canadians are on trial who have already spent time in jail for their alleged roles in the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest. Outside the same courthouse, a protest of Eritrean residents was blocking streets as they marched up on their way to protest Israel at the Israeli embassy... While Lich and Barber are charged with mischief and counselling to commit mischief and intimidation, Greenspon is making the argument that all this ever was, was a lawful protest. “From what we have seen over and over again, the freedom convoy was a peaceful assembly and I don’t think there was any question about that,” he said. But that is not how the government sees it. They originally booked 16 days for this trail and then there was talk of making it 20. Now comes word two weeks will be added and the trial now scheduled to go a whopping 26 days. “And that may not even be enough,” said Greenspon with a chuckle, adding he’s never seen a mischief case lasting for almost a month — weeks longer than many murder cases. The Col. Russell Williams double homicide case was sorted out in two days. The Justice Paul Rouleau inquiry into the calling of the Emergency’s Act lasted 31 days"
Peaceful protests are only good when the left agree with them
NDP falsely accused Freedom Convoy protesters of spitting, shoving Asians - "Freedom Convoy protesters were accused of assaulting Asians by spitting and shoving them, but sworn testimony at a judicial inquiry contradicted these claims... Li described the only violent incident when residents of her apartment building threw cartons of eggs at protesters’ trucks... “Are you concerned the powers being used against the protesters from the convoy could one day be used against protesters on the left?” asked a reporter. “This is a situation without precedent and it can never be applied to other scenarios,” replied Singh. In the Commons, Singh made a claim that the protesters were dangerous arsonists who attempted to set residents on fire while they were sleeping, which was later found to be false."
KRAYDEN: Trudeau reveals why he really crushed the Freedom Convoy - "“What worried me so much about the convoy … the issue is there are people out there who are trying to spread [the anti-vaccine message] and push it beyond just 'my choice is to not do it' .. it’s more of a deliberate attempt to destabilize, to fundraise — to make money off of people's fears — to shift the narrative to undermine their trust in institutions to just sow chaos in our democracy and our society and our using very, very powerful means to do that … in a way that actively and deliberately harms Canadians." Trudeau says he couldn't "shrug" that off. Ah, there we have it. Trudeau forgot all about public safety or at least attempted to redefine as protecting Canadians from ideas that he doesn't agree with. And what about how he had to use the Emergencies [War Measures] Act to restore order and avoid some kind of insurrection that existed only in Trudeau’s challenged mind? Trudeau also comes across as a man who still believes the country cannot long survive without his presumed brilliance and is still “in love with the gig”"
GUNTER: Online-streaming bill threatens freedom of expression | Toronto Sun - "We learned this week, via Emergencies Act commission documents, that during last winter’s Freedom Convoy the Trudeau government had no evidence of Russian or other foreign influence behind the protest, no massive foreign funding and no identifiable threat to national security. Yet the prime minister and several cabinet ministers repeated such claims for weeks – even after the convoy was broken up"
Why the coverage of the trucker protest should worry all Canadians - "the people who now hold this belief that anything less than total control and absolute discipline is a sign of weakness and illegitimacy are now what pollsters politely call “the centre-left.”... And we see this here with centre-left reaction to the national truckers’ protest in Ottawa. No permanent organization is running this protest, which appears to be built around social media, a GoFundMe page, and a loose affiliation of local leadership groups developed in provincial protests by truckers over the past few years. And of course, it does not represent all or even most truckers in the industry... The Vancouver Peace March used to attract 10 percent of the city’s population (50,000 protesters at its peak) for its annual walk across Burrard Bridge to support global nuclear disarmament. And, consequently, the vanguard of the march comprised the Trotskyites, Maoists, and other communist sectarians and foreign dictator fan clubs who saw this as their big annual opportunity to radicalize and recruit ordinary anti-nuclear activists. Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support. But today, that approach is working because our society’s mainstream values have changed and because the target audience is a different one. Because Canadians, as a whole, but especially centre-left voters have now come to believe that the legitimacy of a movement inheres not in its size or the diversity of people and views it represents but rather in its ability to discipline and control its supporters, this protest looks both illegitimate and frightening. Not only is this protest not controlling the speech and signage of its members; it is celebrating its refusal to control these things and instead sticking to the basics of making sure protesters are nonviolent and law-abiding. And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being... Despite a recent passing interest in toppling pro-Confederate and pro-war statues in the United States, Canadian progressives have suddenly become very concerned about nationalist statuary. While I would never try to politicize a Terry Fox statue, myself, the level of offense centre-left urbanites are taking at people placing entirely removable and undamaging objects and signs on Ottawa’s Fox memorial is deeply worrying. No one has toppled the statue; nobody has even got paint on it. Similarly, the fact that there is urine of unknown provenance in the snow near the memorial to the unknown soldier is now being redescribed as protesters, as a whole, urinating on and thereby desecrating the war memorial. Who knew that the mere possibility of a half a dozen or fewer individuals disrespecting a war memorial by urinating near it could de-legitimate a gathering of thousands in the minds of Canada’s mainstream centre-left!?... As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist, and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims."
But of course, nothing BLM members or even leaders say or do is representative of or even reflects badly on BLM, because the left supports it
Emergencies Act inquiry studies fundamental rights and freedoms at stake in protests - "the commission, which is tasked with determining whether the federal government was justified in its invocation of the Emergencies Act to clear the protests, must grapple with some central questions. Where should the line be drawn on limits to Canadians' right to freedom of peaceful assembly? And what are governments and courts to do when that freedom conflicts with the rights of others? The commission launched the policy phase of its inquiry Monday with a roundtable discussion featuring legal experts who study the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Commissioner Paul Rouleau said the question of how to define whether a protest is peaceful is a "critical element" of the inquiry's work. There's been very little discussion about the right to peaceful assembly at the Supreme Court of Canada, leaving the reasonable limits on that freedom a bit murky, said Jamie Cameron, a professor emeritus at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School. The key question, Cameron said, is: "What does it mean to say that an assembly is peaceful in nature?" Some experts argue a line should only be drawn if a protest becomes violent, but others believe demonstrations can become disruptive enough that they can no longer be considered peaceful, she said... "There is a wide degree of consensus on the value of protest in a democratic society," said Vanessa MacDonnell, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa faculty of law and co-director of the uOttawa Public Law Centre... "On its face, it does look to be overbroad," Mathen said, adding that there are time limits on the powers and there was a list of exemptions to the ban on travelling in certain areas... Even when the Emergencies Act is invoked, the Charter of Rights continues to apply, as explicitly stated in the legislation... "It hasn't been fully canvassed by the courts at all but, in principal, the idea of fundraising to support a cause or a social movement is protect by the Charter freedom guarantees," said Michelle Gallant, professor at the Robson Hall Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba. She said the fundraising "animates" the freedoms related to the right to expression, assembly and association... Typically, when the state seizes or freezes someone's assets, the person is first given notice and an opportunity to respond somehow, said Gerard Kennedy, another University of Manitoba law professor. Arguably neither of those procedural rights were afforded to protesters who lost access to their money after the act was invoked."
To liberals, of course, it is very simple: they had no right to protest
Three police forces had doubts about use of Emergencies Act - The Globe and Mail - "Documents tabled at the Emergencies Act inquiry reveal a discrepancy between RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s public defence of the sweeping legislation and her private advice to the government that the police had “not yet exhausted all available tools” when the act was invoked... The e-mail adds to a growing body of evidence from police forces, presented to the inquiry, that challenges the federal government’s argument that the act was needed to end more than three weeks of protests that threw the country’s capital into chaos, upended daily life, and subjected residents and businesses to uncontrolled and at times dangerous protests... the inquiry was also presented with evidence that a top federal civil servant and the police had agreed to a proposed negotiation with the protest leaders but that it was rejected by the government on Feb. 12. Before those talks Mr. Trudeau had publicly said negotiations with the convoy leaders were a “non-starter.”"
Truths the Emergencies Act Inquiry Must Reveal - "The Freedom Convoy became not just a conveyance to bring protesters to Ottawa but, for whatever reason, a kind of magnet for lies. Falsehoods, misdirection and dissembling proliferated about everything from alleged racism and violence to whether or not downtown Ottawa was actually “occupied” or “blockaded” to the technicalities of who even wanted the Emergencies Act and who actually ordered the freezing of bank accounts... The inquiry into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act is finally underway. Much has come to light since those tumultuous events in February suggesting the Liberal government’s drastic action was unjustified. This is mostly thanks to the non-legacy media – see this, for example. Time will tell whether the Public Order Emergency Commission will reach the same conclusion... government and sympathetic witnesses are trying to keep the inquiry’s scope as narrow as possible. Consequently, the public may learn only portions of the whole truth concerning events of which they “have a right to know.”... The evaporating effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines had stunning implications which, had North American governments been paying attention (there is evidence that some other governments, like Denmark’s and Sweden’s, were), should have triggered major changes to pandemic management no later than early 2022... unvaccinated truckers who reluctantly got vaccinated in response to Trudeau’s mandate became more susceptible to Covid-19 infection as they travelled back and forth between Canada and the U.S. This would increase the likelihood that new cases would be imported into Canada. The truckers’ vaccination mandate therefore was a nonsensical public health measure that not only had nothing to do with keeping Canadians “safe” but cannot be “demonstrably justified” as a “reasonable limitation” of a Charter right, as the Charter requires for infringements of rights... One possibility is that federal public health officials, the vast health care bureaucracy and the Prime Minister’s Office (which has significant resources of its own) all failed to come across any of this data or failed to recognize its significance if they did. Such a large blind spot would suggest serious impairment in the federal government’s information-gathering and analysis systems, perhaps outright incompetence... The federal government unequivocally and incessantly assured Canadians that the vaccines were “safe and effective.” Yet, just two days after approving the first Covid-19 vaccine on December 8, 2020, the federal government announced a Vaccine Injury Support Program. Such a program had not been considered necessary throughout the 153 years since Confederation despite numerous traditional vaccines being introduced and administered during that time... Canadian law is quite clear that before administering any medical treatment, the person or party doing so must obtain informed consent from the patient receiving the treatment. The law is also quite clear that in order for this to be the case, absolutely no coercion can be involved and the person receiving the treatment must be advised of all potential adverse outcomes, no matter how small the probability, especially if the outcome is severe. If this is not done, the party providing the treatment has broken the law. When Trudeau began imposing vaccine mandates in 2021 he used coercive means – including the threat of job termination and/or the loss of mobility rights – to cause millions of Canadians to undergo a medical treatment (vaccination) which the federal bureaucracy knew and he knew (or ought to have known) posed the potential for serious injury"
Ottawa police chief ruined chance to shrink the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ inquiry told Tuesday | The Star - "The so-called “Freedom Convoy” occupation in the nation’s capital could have been smaller and easier to manage, if not for then-police chief Peter Sloly’s direction to not concede anything to the protesters"
Convoy blockades cost Canadian economy billions in reduced GDP, documents show - The Globe and Mail - "Minutes of a cabinet-level meeting attended by Ms. Freeland that took place the day before the government invoked the act show ministers were told that the blockades were causing economic losses of 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of GDP per week... Conservative MP and emergency preparedness critic Dane Lloyd said in a statement that the government has not been fully truthful with Canadians about its decision to invoke the act. “It is concerning that the Liberal government was not forthright with Canadians about the existing economic impact,” he said. “It is clear that the Liberal government was more interested in dividing, wedging, stigmatizing and name-calling Canadians, rather than seeking a solution using existing powers and practises.”"
Of course, covid restrictions were costless
Emergencies Act, ‘Freedom Convoy’ records withheld until days before inquiry end: PCO - "Bureaucrats supporting the Prime Minister’s Office claim they need until February 2023 to decide whether to release records about the so-called “Freedom Convoy” — the same month the judicial inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act is set to wrap up."
GOLDSTEIN: Feds cried wolf in invoking Emergencies Act | Toronto Sun - "So far, the various justifications the Trudeau government has given for invoking the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy protests have fallen apart... Neither the RCMP nor Ottawa police asked the federal government to invoke the act, contrary to claims by Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. A senior official with the federal government’s intelligence unit responsible for preventing the financing of terrorist and money-laundering activities testified before a parliamentary committee that the typical person who donated money to the Freedom Convoy protests posed no security threat. “I think that there were people around the world who were fed up with COVID, who were upset and saw the demonstrations against COVID (mandates) and I believe that they just wanted to support the cause,” said Barry MacKillop, deputy director of intelligence at the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre... The Ambassador Bridge blockade ended the night before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act meaning it wasn’t needed, nor did the blockades cause major economic issues. Cross-border trade in February 2022 during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ontario and Alberta went up 16% compared to February 2021... The most serious criminal charges were laid in Coutts, Alberta, where police arrested a dozen people Feb. 14 on allegations ranging from weapons offences to conspiracy to murder. That was the same day Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, meaning the charges were made through normal police investigation procedures, unrelated to the act. Freedom Convoy protesters did not attempt to set fire to an Ottawa apartment building after locking residents inside, contrary to government claims. Despite reports of illegal guns in the cabs of some truckers protesting in Ottawa, no gun charges have been laid to date. Despite claims by Mendicino women were threatened with sexual assault by protesters, no sexual assault charges have been laid to date... invoking the Emergencies Act — resulting in a massive suspension of civil liberties — is supposed to be the last resort when the use of all other legislation has failed... As the Canadian Civil Liberties Association wrote in its legal challenge of Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act, Canada has experienced “terrorist attacks, economic collapses and a pandemic. “All of these situations were dealt with using existing laws and normal democratic processes, or, when absolutely necessary, municipal or provincial emergency powers. “There have also been national protest movements that occupied public spaces and city streets for months and blockaded critical infrastructure such as railways … “These too have been responded to within the context of existing laws.”"
WATCH: Jordan Peterson says Trudeau is 'lying' about Trucker Convoy, never 'says a true word' - ""I don't believe that he ever says a word that's true from what I've been able to observe, it's all stage acting. He's crafted a persona, he has a particular instrumental goal in mind and everything is subordinated to serve that. "The same motivation that is generally typical of people who are narcissistic, which is to be credited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to actually attain it," he said. "He's playing a role. You know, the swastika thing is just like, really? About Canadians? We're going to be worried about Nazis in Canada? I had protests for example, where people accused me of attracting nazis. First of all, that just isn't a thing in Canada, there isn't a Nazi tradition, and I don't know anyone in Canada who ever met anyone who met anyone whose Canadian who is a Nazi. So that's just a non-starter," he continued. Peterson was critical of Trudeau for using the swastika as a scapegoat to dismiss the entire protest, adding that there is not even clear evidence that the person who flew the swastika flag at the protest was a Nazi. "When that sort of thing gets dragged into the conversation right off the bat, that Canadians shouldn't be subjected to the inherent violence of the swastika, first of all it's not even obvious what that swastika was doing there. There's reasonable evidence to suggest that the person who was waving it was either a plant or someone who was making the comment that that was what was characteristic of the government, not of what they believed... Peterson then delved into the Trudeau Liberals' use of the Emergencies Act, which he says he needed to read through thousands of tweets from Liberals to understand the mentality of those who support Trudeau. "You know, the story in Canada that our prime minister implemented the Emergencies Act, and so the question was why? So I went on Twitter when this was trending and read at least 5,000 Twitter comments to try and get a sense. These are people who are supporting Trudeau in his application of the Emergencies Act, I was trying to figure out 'what do they believe is happening?' And the story seems to be... and maybe I'm wrong... 'Make America Great Again' conservative republicans on the pretty far right were attempting to destabilize Canadian democracy," said Peterson. "And so my question was, well, what makes you think they care, first of all about Canada and its democracy, and second, why in the world would they possibly do that? You need a motive for a crime like that. And that was at the same time that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is subsidized by the Liberals to the tune of $1.2 billion a year, was insisting that most of the money that the truckers raised was foreign-financed. If it wasn't the bloody Russians, then it was the American conservatives, and so that all turned out to be a complete lie. After the protests, it was discovered that the vast majority of donors to the freedom convoy in Ottawa were from Canadians, according to the president of GoFundMe. During a House of Commons public safety and national security committee meeting, President Juan Benitez admitted that nearly 90 percent of donations to the movement were from Canada... Peterson then ruminated on why Canadians buy into the mainstream narrative so handedly. "Why do Canadians buy this to the degree they do, and I think they're faced with a hard choice, because in my country for 150 years you could trust the basic institutions, you could trust the government, doesn't matter what political parties were running it... from the socialists to the conservatives. the socialists were mostly union types and they were trying to give the working class a voice, and honestly so," said Peterson. "You could trust the media, even the CBC was a reliable source of news. None of that's true now, so Canadians are asked a hard choice, or were in the trucker convoy situation, and the choice was; either all your institutions are almost irretrievably corrupt, or the truckers were financed by, like, right-wing republican Americans. Well, both of those are preposterous, you might as well take the one that's least disruptive to your entire sense of security. And so I think that's what Canadians did, mostly""
RCMP didn't ask for Emergencies Act to be invoked, commissioner tells Commons committee - "RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki told MPs the Emergencies Act gave police across the country the tools to end Freedom Convoy protests, but said her force did not ask for the act to be invoked."
Letters to the editor: ‘Canadians … at risk of living in a bunch of petty fiefdoms if we don’t rally soon to preserve federalism.’ A constitutional crisis? Plus other letters to the editor for Dec. 14 - The Globe and Mail - "There is a requirement that if the Emergencies Act is invoked, an inquiry is triggered to get to the bottom of why such an extreme measure was needed. However, the crux of Justin Trudeau’s decision is hidden behind a legal opinion that his government refuses to reveal. As someone who has campaigned on openness and transparency, what harm is there in Mr. Trudeau sharing the opinion if it is sound? There would, however, be harm in setting a precedent of invoking the Emergencies Act without justification. What is the point of spending time and money on an inquiry if the people responsible are not required to provide their reasons?"
It was Justin Trudeau who picked the fight with the 'Truckists' - "to situate the events that led to the first-ever invocation of the Emergencies Act last year, you need to roll back the clock to Aug. 12, 2021. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had settled on a pretext to call an early election to transform his minority government into a majority. It was to be a “pandemic election” to coast to victory on his government’s fairly successful handling of its various COVID-19 policy prescriptions and remedies. Until Aug. 12, the Trudeau government had gone along with expert advice to the effect that mandatory vaccination is a bad idea, because it’s divisive and less effective than incentives and rapid-testing schemes, and the last thing you should do is politicize vaccination. But then, on Aug.12, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said federal employees, Crown corporations and federally regulated industries like cross-border trucking and trains and airplanes would fall within the new rule: Vaccines would be mandatory. Three days later, the federal election was announced. The lines were drawn. Either you supported Trudeau’s mandates and did what you were told, or you were a racist and a misogynist, and you were against science, part of a nasty little group that, in Trudeau’s words, “muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?”... During the hearings before Justice Rouleau, the primary justification the Trudeau government offered for opting for the statutory nuclear option to deal with what by then was the collapse of law enforcement in Ottawa was the economic disruption the truckers’ protest was causing, and the mere possibility of violence, either carried out by violent extremists or by some “lone wolf” crank, or in a confrontation between protesters and counter-protesters. “Apart from the economic concerns,” the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) points out, “the evidence on which the government relies to back up these claims is extremely thin. The law enforcement and intelligence agencies whose expertise should help inform the government’s decisions did not assess the protests as giving rise to a serious threat of violence.”... At the end of the day, the epic confrontation between the Truckists and Trudeau was a fight that Trudeau picked. “From a positive and unifying approach, a decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize,” is the way the cerebral Quebec Liberal MP Joël Lightbound put it last year, just before he resigned as chair of the Liberals’ Quebec caucus. “I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions.” And that is exactly what has happened. Former finance minister Bill Morneau says the same, that using vaccine mandates as a political wedge in the 2021 federal election was a bad idea. “I didn’t see that as something that was helpful,” Morneau told the CBC last month. But that’s just Trudeau’s style. “When you react to social media, when you react quickly to the 24/7 news cycle,” Morneau said, “you find yourself taking decisions, saying things that exacerbate the strongly held opinions of the people who are putting out those points of view.”"
