Trudeau achieves greatness

February 23, 2022
I’ve been with Trudeau from the beginning on the pandemic and the convoy insurrection. I think it will become a proud part of Canadian history. At first many Canadians were angry he was standing back. What reason would a Prime Minister have to meet with a group holding Canada’s national Capitol hostage, torturing, abusing and threatening residents, store keepers, shelter and health care workers and demanding the actual overthrow of the recently elected government of the country? Who thinks any minority has the right to demand the immediate removal of the PM and attempt to force it and expect him to meet with them? To do what, surrender?
In fact, like the airliners of 911 in the US, using trucks as weapons was a new type of terrorism. No one knew it was an occupation, not a demonstration, until they set up camp. Even if CSIS knew about the crowd funding, they, like many of the fund donors, did not realize it would be used for occupation. Who knew convoy members would use their children as shields?
Ottawa police, were guided by memories of the G 20 fiasco in Toronto and other police embarrassments. Remember that RCMP police sergeant pepper spraying students sitting on a BC university campus road while parading the Indonesian dictator and Pacific Rim leaders through their university?
I made one significant mistake in my earlier commentaries. I assumed most Canadians, and all Canadian governments and police administrations were familiar with the 1849 precedent of treating riots as crime scenes to be observed, investigated and dealt with in the criminal and civic courts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buildings_in_Montreal

Most Canadians apparently were not. If governments were, they didn’t mention it but the feds behaved as if they did. Trudeau has already pledged $20 million to businesses harmed by blockades – a feature of the 1849 policy.
It is shameful and disgusting what citizens in Ottawa and truckers across the continent had to cope with and endure at border crossings across the country. Even so, it is still much preferable that the blockades have been mostly broken without any Canadian, and especially no Canadian child, having yet been shot by another Canadian.
Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s declaration of the then War Measures Act led to the rise of the Partis Québecois which is a rift in Confederation to this day. Trudeau fils managed to suppress his rebellion without any of the random arrests that took place in the October crisis.
This crisis may well lead to a return to a Western party with separatist leanings. Public support in the East is raising the idea of Jean Charest for Conservative Leader. Charest, already a past leader of the late Progressive Conservative Party and a past Liberal Premier (aka Prime Minister) of Quebec. A PC right of centre party, led by Charest, would, I think, be considerably more likely to form a federal government than a rump western separatist party led by Pierre Poilievre, the current hard right Conservative candidate for leader. I can’t imagine Poilievre and Conservative interim leader, Candice Bergen, ever forming a national government. I hope Jake Stewart will lose his seat for proudly, publicly, creating a photo op supporting the treasonous rebellion.
Poisonous trolls, like FOX News in the US, continue to spread dispicable lies. FOX reported that RCMP horses killed a woman – a flat out lie. They also reposted a convoy trucker’s claim that the majority of Canadians support them. Conservative Members of Parliament are posting claims that donors to the convoy funds are having their bank accounts frozen – also lies.
To me the scene of police silently and steadily moving forward, pushing back and separating insurrectionists and supporters was beautiful. The dismantling of the camps, playgrounds, hot tubs and kitchens was methodical and threat starving. I haven’t heard any suggestions how the big trucks could be removed without huge tow trucks whose owners were also being terrorized by convoy participants until the the Emergency Measures Act gave the policing co-operative authority to commandeer them.
What remains is still a gawdawful mess. There are millions of images, dozens of rooftop surveillance posts, drone footage and an encyclopedia of public social media and convoy threads to be studied.
I believe, hope and trust that Prime Minister Trudeau’s and his cabinet’s performance will be recognized as a model to democracies of the world and an honoured precedent in Canadian civil rights history.                                           DAC