February 2022
When the last of the protesters in Ottawa have either gone home or been arrested, an independent and transparent inquiry must be launched into the whole mess, including Trudeau’s implementation of the Emergency Act. There are many questions that need to be answered, but in the interest of space, I will limit it to just these:
Was the implementation of the Emergencies Act necessary, or was it an abuse of power? Police had already had the enforcement capabilities without the act; there apparently just wasn’t the political will to do it.
Now that Trudeau’s government seems willing to identify and seize the funding sources for protesters, does this now mean that the environmental activist groups protesting our energy industry and pipeline construction, or blockading our railways, will have their funding sources seized as well? Why weren’t these measures already been taken against environmental activists in response to their activities, some of which had just as devastating impact on Canadians and the economy? Of course, I’m being facetious, as we all know such an action will never happen when Trudeau agrees with the protesters and their objectives.
This incredible over-reach by any government in a liberal democracy should be concerning to all. How long will it be before Trudeau’s government orders the seizure of bank accounts for people who donate money to or take out paid memberships in the Conservative Party of Canada, or take out paid subscriptions to Conservative media outlets like the Toronto Sun or Rebel News?
Getting back to the Emergencies Act, was former Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly really that incompetent, or was he simply handcuffed by the same politicians who eventually threw him over the side of the ship when things got politically inconvenient? I’d like to know why the ink was barely dry on his resignation letter when the combined RCMP, OPP and Ottawa Police officers finally moved in and began clearing the protest site in Ottawa. Further, the official implementation of the Emergencies Act has yet to be confirmed by Parliament, so there’s that too.
I’d also like to hear Liberal MPP Mitzie Hunter justify her comments on Friday on The John Oakley Show on Global News Radio 640 Toronto, where she commented that the successful handing of the protest in Toronto was due to the work of Mayor John Torry and Toronto Police Chief James Ramer, but the failure of Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and former Chief Peter Sloly to effectively manage the protest in Ottawa is all the fault of Premier Doug Ford? Responsible for success; responsible for failure. You can’t pick just one Mitzie.
Ford could find a cure for cancer, and Hunter would complain that he was putting the cancer treatment industry out of business.
As a final thought, will Parliament Hill now become a walled fortress; a no-go zone for anyone except politicians and government workers? I understand that for the next several weeks, Parliament Hill will remain off-limits to the general public to prevent protesters from setting up again, but it cannot become a permanent situation. A frequent joke made about the numerous protests during the tenure of Ontario Premier Mike Harris is that there was not a single blade of grass that wasn’t trampled on the law of Queen’s Park, the home of the Ontario Legislature. Despite this, Queen’s Park wasn’t turned into a walled fortress. Parliament Hill be shouldn’t either
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The following columns also provide great commentary:
Rex Murphy: Media’s Alarmist Reporting of Trucker Protest and Trudeau’s Intolerant Rhetoric Are Shameful
February 4, 2022 Updated: February 7, 2022
“COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke ‘science’ and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as ‘anti-science,’ or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard,” writes John G. West in his commentary “The Rise of Totalitarian Science.”
“Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future. The genie of unaccountable government power in the name of science has been let out of the bottle. Will we be able to put it back in?”
During the months of full civic tumults and riots that plagued numerous U.S. cities in 2020, mainly the work of Black Lives Matter or the newly emergent curse of the oxymoronically self-named Antifa, the U.S. press was unwonted genteel in their coverage. Recall these mobs took over the central section of Seattle, set up “guards” to determine who could enter, nightly rolled through the downtown, and terrified residents of their liberated “Chazistan.” Businesses were attacked, saw murder and violence, and of course the riots were marked with scorn for and attacks on the police.
Residents of Seattle were, effectively, kept hostage in their own city, this in 21st-century democratic U.S.A.
The mayor of utopian Seattle, during an outbreak of pure lawlessness, put the capstone on the folly by describing it as the beginning of “a summer of love.” A statement—let me coin a word—of such “dim-wititude” that it should be inscribed on granite and put outside the municipal offices under a bust of the mayor. Elsewhere in so many other cities there were nightly rampages, attempts to burn down police buildings, “occupations,” vast destruction of property, and mass looting. The works.
Still the news media were, shall we say, comforting, or fully complacent, downplaying what was in front of their eyes. Everyone who followed the riots will recall the epic moment when a reporter—standing in front of a three-storey building that was one huge torch, flames leaping up into the night sky—gave the immortal judgement, on camera, live: “Fiery, but mostly peaceful.” He was employed by, of course—how could he not be—CNN.
There was six months of this, and the entire time the reporting of the riots and the looting was in the main cowardly, almost overtly supportive, and totally inadequate.

Here in Canada, we have had (as I am writing) six days of protest, in one city, and the dynamic is almost perfectly opposite. The protest has been actually not “mainly” but overwhelmingly peaceful, and the political and major press response wildly alarmist and ominous.
Ottawa shops remain with their windows intact, no assaults on police stations or police being bombarded with sticks and stones, no “armed patrols” by the truckers telling people where they could go or not go, and a splendid number of rather endearing incidents that have failed to make it to national or local press.
It’s a protest after two years of COVID lockdowns, shifting standards and policies, increasing overreach of governments’ authority impinging on the civil liberties of all, and a gutting of whatever protections our once-hallowed, now hollowed-out, Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed. The truckers, early on in this crisis, were, like health staff and grocery clerks, praised as civil heroes, even by Mr. Trudeau himself, and the press. Truckers delivered the necessary foods and goods during the outbreak, their courage and sense of duty a tribute to the Canadian way of supporting people in a hard time.
However, two years in, bearing the weight of the “save the world” carbon tax, increasing COVID anxieties, and vaccine mandate policies imposed without consultation with those they most affect, when they decide they must protest and execute a two- or three thousand-mile trek to Ottawa to do so, they have been piled on with the most outrageous rhetoric from the very leaders and press which once lauded them.
Our great freedom-guardian press has sought out every minor incident—and there have been only minor incidents in a protest involving thousands—to brand and colour the whole movement, amplified all criticism, taking to calling the truckers “yahoos,” wildly exaggerating slights or perceived “threats,” and for the most part studiously avoiding giving anything like a reasoned and calm account of the concerns of the citizens who constitute the protest.
PM Trudeau, having removed himself and gone into protection (he caught COVID, after receiving the vaccines and the booster, which might be seen as undercutting the need to mandate them on others), announced in the most febrile terms that they were “misogynists, racists, and science-deniers.” Further, that they are a contemptible “fringe.” On Jan. 31 he was at it again: “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism …. There is no place in our country for threats, violence, or hatred.” Could he be trying to—deepest sin of the Wokery Church—“marginalize a minority?”
Mr. Trudeau’s tone and terms, his condemnatory invective, is completely out of proportion. He is deliberately stimulating polarization, painting a set of working-class Canadians—who rarely protest—as villains. And, I’ll claim it as a fact, that the men and women who drove halfway across Canada are not vandals, they are not racists; indeed they are just as most other working Canadians are. And it is shameful for a prime minister—who invokes tolerance as his number one virtue every time the clock ticks another second—to sound such intolerant rhetoric over one group of Canadian citizens exercising their due right to protest. Coming from a prime minister the attack is, to use a word he must know, deplorable.
A great swathe of the press is in tune with the Mr. Trudeau. They exude a superior attitude to those they report on, some are describing the protesters as an “occupying force,” and are most outraged by the “honking.” Dear me. A wave of vandalized and burnt churches last year received far more tepid moralizing.
Let me end with this observation from Glenn Reynolds, a keen and clear observer of American politics, in a column on the Ottawa moment in the New York Post:
“In Canada, the press even tried to pretend that the thousands of truckers driving to the capital city of Ottawa were actually Russian agents. When that failed, it fell back on its old standard, calling them fascists, Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists.”
There used to be a distinction between the press and the politicians. During this last week you would need a microscope in some cases to see it.
Rex Murphy is an author and columnist, and a former CBC Television and CBC Radio host.
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Winnipeg Vehicle Attack on Trucker Protesters a Warning for Politicians, Legacy Media to Calm the Situation
February 6, 2022 Updated: February 7, 2022
Canadians were horrified when video footage of a car careening through pedestrians at a Winnipeg protest began making the rounds on the internet. We couldn’t help but be reminded of the scene from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when James Alex Fields killed one and injured dozens as he plowed his car into a densely packed protest. Thankfully, while four people were injured in the Winnipeg attack, nobody was killed.
David Alexander Zegarac has now been criminally charged and is in custody. We may never know what inspired him to allegedly drive his jeep through a crowd of peaceful protesters on the night of Feb. 4 in Winnipeg. That dangerous event is a symptom of an increasingly tense atmosphere in Canada as anti-mandate protests continue to grow across the country, while legacy media and political leaders continue to villainize the demonstrators. If pressure continues to build, we likely will see more unstable people inspired to commit extrema actions.
We know that Zegarac is not representative of people who oppose the trucker’s convoy protests. Responsible people don’t label large, identifiable groups based on the actions of outlying individuals. If only we had responsible leadership in Canada right now. Instead, despite every indication that the Truckers for Freedom convoy has been remarkably peaceful and respectful, there has been a concerted effort to try to paint the protesters as hateful and possibly violent due to the appearance of a couple of offensive flags among the crowds.
A common denominator among those who commit hate crimes is that they don’t see their victims as being human. They have convinced themselves of some sort of personal superiority over those they target and often think they are making the world a better place with their sick actions. Most of these kinds of people keep their vile ideologies limited to spewing hatred over the internet or doing late-night, petty acts of vandalism and graffiti. Unfortunately, some of these people can become fully unhinged if they are provoked and inspired. Then they can become dangerous.
There is no denying that the Truckers for Freedom protests have been experiencing a groundswell of support from Canadians. They may not represent a majority of Canadians, but clearly, they represent millions of them. That makes them a distinct group of sorts and efforts should be made by our political leaders and legacy media outlets to at least respect them, even if not agreeing with them. Instead, we have seen nothing but efforts to insult them and defame them.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came out and labelled the protesters as being racists, misogynists, and extremists, he consciously and dangerously went out of his way to single out a group and belittle it. At a time when we are seeing an unprecedented, unified series of protests across the nation, instead of trying to keep the situation calm, respectful, and safe, Trudeau poured gasoline onto the fire. He then went into hiding.
History has shown repeatedly how people on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum, whether right or left, can be incited into dangerous actions due to irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric from political leadership. We have been lucky to date that Trudeau’s words haven’t appeared to have inspired many extreme actions.
At least, not yet.
The fringe within the Truckers for Freedom convoy may be inspired to get extreme too if the ongoing campaign of vilification against them continues. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated throughout every major city in Canada over the past weekend. There were no riots, no burnings, and no assaults. As these demonstrations continue though, frustrated, unstable individuals may feel compelled to get extreme. How much more demonization do we expect them to take? Any of their actions will of course be attributed to the majority of the demonstrators leading to even more disorder.
It has been incredible how so many people have attended so many protests in such a peaceful way. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we got through this entire chapter of Canadian history without any major acts of violence and without deaths?
It is clear that the protesters aren’t giving up any time soon. Trudeau doesn’t have to come out and meet them, but he is going to have to start listening to them and treating them with respect. Leaders don’t ridicule and divide their people during periods of crisis. They inspire, unite, and work to deescalate dangerous situations. Let’s all hope Trudeau figures this out before things get ugly.
The dangerous incident in Winnipeg was a warning shot. It should serve as a wake-up call to our political and media leaders that we need to change the tone of our discourse to one of respect and potential compromise.
Cory Morgan is a columnist and business owner based in Calgary.