This is a brilliant and refreshingly honest take on Canada by Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Headline (and this is a free link):
What Canada’s Truckers Know —
It’s no longer a liberal constitutional state. A coercive Ottawa rules over daily life.
The opening lays bare Canada’s real crisis. Spoiler alert: it isn’t truckers.
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared last month that truckers protesting his Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Ottawa hold “unacceptable views,” he accentuated the real reason the drivers decided they had no choice but to go to the streets. Their government, headed by the Liberal Party, has become decidedly illiberal.
“Illiberal” is how a lot of observant people describe left-wing parties and governments these days — particularly those who describe themselves as “liberal” or “democratic” (hi Jagmeet Singh). This illiberalist state is becoming another pandemic, of its own kind. The term “illiberal” is another way of saying that they’re the opposite of liberal. Let’s see if a quick internet search for opposite of liberal lines up with our current situation in Ottawa under the “Liberal” party:
Why yes it does line up precisely. She goes on:
Intolerance is ugly. But for Mr. Trudeau, who proudly backs Black Lives Matter, it’s OK in this case because it’s the politically correct variety: He’s denouncing the opinions of a bunch of yahoos.
Coming from a prime minister sitting atop a powerful administrative state, this goes a long way in explaining what has gone from a protest to a movement.
She explains the state of Canadian affairs with the kind of amazing clarity that someone from outside the country is best able to do. Even I understood it, and I’ve had my brain muddled by watching state-owned CBC and liberalvision CTV and reading the GLobe and Mail for years (…oh… that’s the problem!). At the risk of over-pasting the article here’s more of it, but I encourage you to not only read the article at WSJ, but subscribe to WSJ as I do, because it’s the best value in actual news that you can find. It’s ilCBC, if you get my meaning:
Canada is advertised as a modern democracy that respects pluralism. This implies differences of opinion peacefully coexisting on a variety of subjects from assessing health risks to raising and educating children to political philosophy. Individuals, even when in the minority, retain rights to free speech and assembly.
Yet in practice Canadians who oppose big government increasingly find they are living under a woke, progressive majoritarianism that believes it owns the truth. Dissidents are hounded out of the public square and even the prime minister cancels contrarians without batting an eye.
This is the penultimate part where she seems to channel actual liberal thinking and truth unlike what you might read in one of Canada’s Trudeau-funded “news” media outlets (which is virtually all of them):
In theory, Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms—which is part of the constitution—ought to protect civil rights. But the Canadian judiciary has been drifting ideologically left for decades. Courts today interpret the constitution through the lens of social justice rather than individual liberty. The state enjoys wide powers to crush dissent.
The government claims its Covid-19 restrictions do not limit freedom, but that’s a phony argument. As Bruce Pardy, the executive director of Rights Probe, a Toronto-based think tank, explained in the Financial Post Nov. 3, “By maintaining the pretence that people have a real choice between being vaccinated or being stripped of their employment, schooling, social interactions and travels, governments seek to coerce and manipulate without triggering charter protections.”
Please read it. If you can, subscribe to the WSJ. You will be smarter for it.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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