Rex Murphy: Trudeau's monumentally misguided emergency measures are an insult to Canadians

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By now the whole world understands that our boy is not the sharpest tool in the woodshed.  what is worse, he must have surrounded himslef with advisors even stupider.

There were many path not taken.

This was not even an armed rebellian by patriots.  The army refused to be called out. So just why is he behaving this way?

In the Quebec Crisis in the late 60's a badly unprepared government had to stop an incipiant Marxist revolution taking advantage of local identity issues.  A sudden onset of martial law did it.  War measures act was the only tool available.

Now we have a popular workers uprising against laws patently wrong.  It is potent but also profoundly peaceful.

Rex Murphy: Trudeau's monumentally misguided emergency measures are an insult to Canadians

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/rex-murphy-trudeaus-monumentally-misguided-emergency-measures-are-an-insult-to-canadians/ar-AATWVYC

This is the most monumentally stupid, monumentally arrogant, and monumentally misguided decision by a prime minister since 1867.© Provided by National Post Truck drivers and their supporters block streets during an anti vaccine mandate protest near the Parliament Buildings on February 15, 2022 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his sophomoric musings on the nature of Canada some years back, famously declared that Canada has “no core identity,” most of us thought he was stating his opinion, however ridiculous, of the country as he saw it at the time.

We were wrong, ever so wrong. He was stating an ambition. He was declaring a goal.

After six years of the most amateur government this country has ever suffered, with the invocation of the most crushing legislation any government can call upon, the Emergencies Act, to attack and subdue a group of ordinary Canadian workers, he’s well on the way to achieving his “post-national” ambitions.

That’s one core value out the window: the right to peaceful protest. The invocation of wartime-like emergency powers by the national government to deal with a workers’ protest is grotesquely overwrought, something very close to lunatic.

If I were to seek out the one word that, more than any other, would characterize this dangerous and needless assumption of the state’s greatest powers, I’d come down on “insult.” It is an insult to the nature of the country, to the character of its citizens and to its cherished status as a democracy, for which so many of its citizens were wounded or died in two world wars to preserve.

The Emergencies Act could only have been brought in at this time by a leader and a government that have forgotten, or never knew, what Canada is and represents; that does not fully appreciate how its citizens, when they are in disagreement, eventually meet and work their way calmly to agreement.

Canada has no “core identity”? Well, maybe it seems that way to a prime minister who appears to view Canada’s history as a sequence of horrors for which he must personally apologize. Pride in our history, another core Canadian value, has also been severely diminished.

Canada has no “core identity”? Well, it might appear that way to a politician who, in the full vesture of the office of the prime minister, bewails this welcoming and flourishing multicultural country as systemically racist, while himself getting caught up in a blackface scandal. The dignity of the highest Canadian office, another core value, has been put under severe strain.

Canada has no “core identity”? Well, maybe to a leader who so loves to puffily pontificate about his progressive ideology on the international stage with the world’s leading virtuecrats, and promotes a global agenda over the real needs of his own country — saving the economies of the western provinces and having some respect for the dignity of their citizens.

Maybe to that person, Canada does not, in fact, have any “core identity.” Commitment above all else to unity in Confederation is another value that is being put to the test.

To another point, central to the present moment: what would it have taken to forestall this embarrassing — the word is far too timid, but let that be — flight into legislative overkill that we saw this week?

The answer: a smidgen of courage, and an ounce of humility — not to go off stage, not to hide, not to remove himself from the country’s leadership while a difficult, but not crisis-level, situation was in play.

Here’s the mother of all questions for Trudeau and it is one that he cannot, and will never, answer: what was so difficult about having a talk with the leaders of a group of Canadians who found some of the government’s COVID regulations to be a grievous burden?

When Black Lives Matter flooded the streets, Trudeau not only met with them, he went into the streets and joined in on the their American-inspired protest. He gave them a knee and bowed his head. But he would not meet with the truckers. He would not talk to their representatives. There was certainly no kneeling.

He rhetorically abused the citizens in the protest. He suggested they were racists and misogynists and that they hold “unacceptable views.” Which was a deliberate tactic to isolate them, to marginalize them, to mark them as somehow unCanadian.

The most egregious, polarizing agent in this entire protest has been the leader of the country. Two hours of talking, a little respect, a touch of democratic process and the whole affair could have been washed away. And we would not now have half the world asking: what in God’s name is going on in Canada?