AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Roman
Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the “Emergencies Act” on Monday, which allows the Canadian government to detain, fine, or freeze the bank accounts of anyone alleged by the government to be violating the law without a court order, has rightly been called an act of tyranny. But it is hardly undemocratic—if by “undemocratic” you mean against the wishes of the democratically elected officials or the voters who elected them. The far more significant element of what is going on in Canada is not that Trudeau has resorted to these methods. It is that he has done so under pressure from millions of his voters who demanded that he “crush” their “enemies” irrespective of individual rights. For as much as Trudeau and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, have been assailed by many American critics for implying that the protestors in Ottawa are “terrorists,” this has actually been the predominate view espoused in large parts of the Canadian media. The truckers-are-terrorists narrative has also been the discourse among liberal Canadians on Twitter.
“Terrorism,” in this sense, is not an entirely inaccurate term, if one adopts a literal interpretation of causing terror rather than the legal definition of “terrorism” as using violence in furtherance of political or social objectives. Without a doubt these truckers and those who have joined them have inspired terror in left-leaning Canadians in Ottawa and across the country. Of course, the truckers have done little to actually justify terror in a traditional understanding of the word. They have not engaged in violence, unlike the Black Lives Matters “protests” of 2020. Yet they instill terror, nonetheless. It is easy for conservatives to call it absurd (and it is), but the problem is that, absurd or not, the terror the truckers have caused is real in the minds of the country’s ruling left-wing elite.
Whether the truckers and their allies have engaged in violence is beside the point for those demanding a harsh response. The merits of their policy demands are equally irrelevant. What instills terror is not the actions of the protestors, but their very existence. The existence of a group of traditionally working-class, mostly male individuals opposing vaccine mandates and the liberal consensus strikes fear into the hearts of those for whom that consensus is their world. For a leftist in the Western world who has spent the better part of a decade occupying a “safe space” where they are ascendent, the world is going their way, they are winning the argument, and their enemies are meeting their just deserts, the presence of these protestors represents an invasion. An invasion of the outside world into Ottawa. An invasion by reality into their carefully cultivated world. Their response is not so much trauma but the violence of their own, a demand for punishment. If the proper internalized response to “wrong think” or “triggering” actions in a workplace or school is for the principal or HR to intervene and punish the offender, then (in the minds of these left-leaning elites) the proper duty of a government is to crush those who would ruin a societal safe space. The problem is that, in 2022, liberals now define the entire world as their own private safe space. And even just existing within that liberal world, which is all that the protestors in Canada are asking to be allowed to do – after all, mandates that prevented them from being able to work, attend school, receive medical care or worship have made it impossible to exist – represents an invasion.
The “Emergencies Act” may be a Canadian law, but the attitude behind it and the rhetoric levied at the protestors should be familiar to anyone who has listened to charges following January 6th that the Republican Party is made up exclusively of “terrorists.” Or the demands that Attorney General Merrick Garland investigate parents who speak up at school board meetings. Those parents are, like the Canadian truckers, “invaders” rather than “citizens,” to be dealt with by expulsion, through force if necessary, and not listened to or accommodated. Trudeau was merely able to follow through more fully on the words Garland issued. Millions of Democrats across the country, and their favored media outlets, would have welcomed moves by the Department of Justice to freeze the assets of groups organizing parents to oppose Critical Race Theory, or protest school closures.
Democrats, and even some self-described Republicans prefer to blame Donald Trump for such division and polarization in society. But Canada provides evidence against this thesis. Canada had no Donald Trump. Justin Trudeau has ruled since 2015, before Donald Trump faced voters for the first time. Yet, based on recent events, liberal Canadian voters have undergone the exact same radicalization as their American counterparts.
That is because what is invading the safe space of liberal elites is not an organized minority of political “terrorists,” but rather reality itself. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, liberals took to declaring “This is not normal.” As bizarre as the gesture was, it implied not that Donald Trump’s policies were wrong, but rather that the very political debates which were occurring were illegitimate and should not occur. For liberals, it was a statement that there should not be a debate on mass immigration, there should not be a debate on globalization, there should not be a debate on social values (even though the definition of the word “woman” has changed dramatically for those on the left between 2016 and 2022). That a presumed consensus on these issues was so strictly imposed showed that the world had taken a sharp left turn.
What the left failed to grasp is that Donald Trump did not convince voters out of the blue that border security might be a problem, or that America’s domestic industry had been gutted. Nor did Boris Johnson or Dominic Cummings convince British voters to question the value of the European Union. They succeeded because they questioned things voters already had serious doubts about. Voters had serious doubts about those institutions because they were already failing.
This can be seen with the issue of crime, where the left desperately tried to rewrite history to imply that crime had not been that bad in the 1980s, that the tough policing policies of the 1990s had therefore not been needed to help reduce it, and therefore that tradeoffs did not exist between the extent of policing and the crime rate. The very violence with which dissent from BLM dogma was crushed in the media, in corporate America, and on universities in 2020 was less an offensive Marxist campaign, and more a defense mechanism to maintain the version of the world the left wanted to inhabit. It was easy to believe that the invaders who threatened it were white supremacist racists, not criminals of all backgrounds.
COVID is the same. It allowed the left to avoid confronting tradeoffs between freedom and safety by creating enemies; namely, those opposed to lockdowns and those who opposed universal vaccine mandates. The left then blamed them for preventing the creation of a magical world where COVID was gone because everyone locked down just long enough and got vaccinated, so Omicron somehow didn’t exist. The irony is that those demanding action against the truckers are just as tired of COVID and restrictions as the truckers. Yet, whereas the truckers have livelihoods which force them to engage with reality, those demanding the suppression of the truckers’ protest have the luxury of scapegoating.
For Trudeau and the Canadian left, this latest action against the trucker protests is another extension of the “rule or ruin” mentality that has gripped the left in the West today. The same pattern can be seen in Democrats’ panicked rhetoric regarding the legitimacy of elections, which betrayed a pathological fear of living in a society they did not rule. For the left today, the only option is to rule the country and its institutions, or destroy them. The problem is that, because the forces arraigned against their rule are not other people but reality itself, rule is not a viable option, as many of the more insightful observers on the left suspect deep down. Hence, they prefer to ruin, to go down in a temper tantrum rather than compromising with the world as it is.
Canada this week showed us a preview of the end state of this mentality. On a policy level, the critics of the convoy have not “won.” Ontario has dropped its mandates early, following most other Canadian provinces. Trudeau’s actions have thus become about “ruining” his enemies as punishment for the failure of policies which cannot work because the real world will not let them. It is an emotionally unhinged decision to wreak havoc on Canadian society, with the power of the state behind it.
Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.