OPINION
Here we are into Week Four of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” occupation of Ottawa, and the news coming out of Bytown hasn’t changed one iota. Sure, the Ottawa Police Board has a totally new membership, the Chief of Police, Peter Sloly has resigned in disgrace, only to be replaced by Steve Bell, who but for his well-shaved head, could be used as a stunt double for Ontario premier Doug Ford. Then, up on The Hill we have western Canada’s favourite Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau who, by introducing the new Emergency Measures Act, is now in the process of creating what, at least in the Conservative Party of Canada’s brain trust minds, a dangerous threat to our democracy.
To be honest about it, the Ottawa occupation story is starting to sound more and more like some watered-down version of the January 6th insurrection in Washington, DC, where indignant Trump supporters demanded that Mike Pence overturn the November election results and return The Donald to the White House throne room. Here in Canada, Pence is replaced by the Governor General, who is currently still trying to recover from a crippling bout of laughing hysteria at even the suggestion of turning our nation over to a group of unelected thugs. In Washington, a slow response to the riotous conditions that were getting worse at the Capitol is plagiarized by a Chief of Police (Sloly) and a fairly silent but influential coterie of Ottawa police officers and a Police Commission calling for “restraint”, even as some of the officers apparently were diffident with respect to their duty to maintain law and order during the convoy’s occupation of the downtown. And THEN…
Not to be outdone in its lack of originality as a story, we also have our official Party of Hate, the CPC, currently led by Candice Bergen (without her wearing her now-favourite MAGA hat, unfortunately), raging about the Emergency Powers legislation being “overreach”, even as her sidekick, Pierre Poilievre, continues to demand that all Canadian governments cancel their COVID-related mandates and allow the Ottawa lawless hordes to continue their “peaceful” protest and occupation – just not in places where “real” commerce is being practiced and unduly affecting hundreds of thousands of Canadians trying to put bread on the table, as was the case in Windsor, Ont.
The Ottawa scenario is providing some amazing fodder for creative writers, who now see the possibility of churning out an Oscar-winning four-hour comedic thriller starring Saskatchewan’s very own Kim Coates. Consider, if you will, the items of “minor” interest coming to the fore in this debacle: the announcement last week coming from the “Organizing Committee” of the convoy to await the “expose” of intrigue, subterfuge and “Communist” affiliation with the membership of the “Every Child Matters” movement, the arms cache seized by the RCMP near the U.S. border in Alberta, or that truck stolen in Peterborough, ON laden with firearms that no one knows where it went because the shipper was too stupid to wire the shipment with a copious amount of GPS trackers. And then there’s that money being raised at an allegedly “Christian” web site called “GiveSendGo” from anonymous American donors to support the truckers’ freedom march, springing into action after the normally used “GoFundMe” site shut down its own funding mechanism following allegations of fraud and corruption in the money’s utilization by the Freedom Convoy’s “organizers”…
There you have it – a blockbuster that makes the “Godfather” series look like a minor 7-11 hold-up by teenagers using water pistols.
It’s bloody hard for me not to be cynical as to what is now happening in our capital, and threatens to spread even wider as the protest tries to increase its momentum in exacerbating chaos. The participants in this charade are simultaneously trying to feed the Canadian public their own version of the Canadian identity, while dabbling in the time-honoured practice of revisionism. For anyone unfamiliar with the exact meaning of that word, one must remember how it came to be utilized, especially by those professing to be “true Communists”. Leon Trotsky correctly noted that Karl Marx’s economic revolution that would henceforth become known as the rise and “dictatorship of the proletariat” could not possibly have occurred around 1914, because Mother Russia was still a feudal state, not an industrialized one (the same also applies to the Maoist revolution that occurred in China following World War II), so perhaps the party’s attempts to govern by the utilization of work “committees” was a tad premature. Uncle Joe Stalin, not wishing to hear such nonsensical rhetoric, promptly had one of his assassin teams dispatch friend Leon to Workers’ Heaven, leaving our less educated politicians to continue to utilize the word “Communist” as though they knew what the word stands for and actually means in theoretical practice.
This inability of today’s Conservative Party leadership to think for itself, much less articulate policies that sound more “Canadian”, has resulted in the proliferation of hate-spewed rhetoric that their fellow “conservatives” such as Jason Kenney regularly feed our media sources. In that process, their leadership has chosen as their mantra “Blame it all on Justin”, even though it was Pierre Poilievre’s feeble-minded rewriting of the Election Act that spurred Canadians to totally reject the notion of Stephen Harper ever again becoming our duly elected Prime Minister.
So, what does our blessed Party of Hate come up with? Well, now they’re producing their own version of revisionist history by promoting Poilievre as the new Messiah of the party. They are simultaneously burying his past record of having been the one shoving the dagger into the hopes of there ever being another Conservative-led Parliament, and leaving us with the old and stale Natural Governing Party – the Liberals – to rule the federal jurisdictional waves.
The Conservatives will tell you that it is the NDP that is doing the political roll-over act by supporting the declaration of the Emergency Powers Act, when they were once against the imposition of the War Measures Act under the PM’s father, Pierre Trudeau. This ignores the reality of a few hundred trucks honking their horns whenever they feel like it are tactics used by so-called “rebel forces” promoting insurrection and government overthrow to demoralize populations.
Our very own MP, Randy Hoback, claims to support the truckers’ cause, while citing opposition from the provinces (Alberta and Saskatchewan, of course) as cause to reflect upon the potential damage done to our constitutional rights should that Act be proclaimed. He’s wrong about this – dead wrong. The ONLY way to resolve this situation is for ALL parties to stop this asinine bickering and one-upmanship and delivering a solution to the Canadian public that satisfies the majority of all Canadians’ expectations for proper governance.
Based upon the behaviour of Poilievre and Bergen, however, don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
