OPINION:
Amid Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s increasingly ham-handed attacks on Canadian truckers’ legitimate, peaceful Freedom Convoy protest, a meme has been circulating online strongly suggesting that Mr. Trudeau could well be the love child of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
While obviously, you can’t believe everything you see online, the striking resemblance of the two men in a series of side-by-side comparison photos is compelling — if not convincing — evidence of the supposed patrilineage. It’s said to be the result of an extramarital affair by his mother, Margaret Trudeau, then Canada’s first lady, during a multi-island “second honeymoon” Caribbean vacation with her husband, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, in early 1971.
But Justin Trudeau’s disgraceful escalation from name-calling and vilification of the truckers to Monday’s iron-fisted invocation of Canada’s never-before-used 1988 Emergencies Act to crush the truckers’ nonviolent protest bears a far stronger resemblance to Castro’s ruthless crushing of any and all opposition in his Caribbean island prison state.
The supposed “emergency” caused by the truckers who have converged on Parliament Hill in the Canadian capital, Ottawa? It’s their entirely reasonable, but unheeded, call for doing away with Mr. Trudeau’s seemingly endless COVID-19 mask and vaccination mandates on truckers crossing the border.
In keeping with the mindset of a Castroite tyrant, Mr. Trudeau’s first instinct was not to offer to meet with the Freedom Convoy protest’s leaders to listen to their grievances, but rather to heap scorn and baseless obloquy on them.
First, he shamefully suggested they were Nazis and Confederates, and subsequently has called them racist, sexist, homophobic and even transphobic — every knee-jerk attack adjective the left reflexively aims at anyone who disagrees with them, and all without any basis in fact.
On Wednesday, it was “second verse, same as the first” for Tinpot Trudeau when, on the floor of Parliament, he smeared as Nazis opposition politicians — one of them a Jewish woman — who oppose what she called his “unjustified national emergency.”
“Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag,” Mr. Trudeau said. “We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs. … These illegal protests need to stop.”
Invoking emergency powers, Mr. Trudeau has not only threatened to freeze truckers’ corporate bank accounts but also to suspend their vehicles’ insurance.
“If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended,” said Chrystia Freeland, Mr. Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance.
The truckers have also been threatened with huge fines and prison time. Crowdfunded sources of financial support for them are being frozen.
The CBC reported Wednesday that under the Emergencies Act, “temporary measures” could also include fines “amounting to thousands of dollars or jail time for those bringing children under the age of 18 to participate in an unlawful assembly.”
In hindsight, the Freedom Convoy’s blockade of the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Ontario to Detroit and accounts for one-fourth of the cross-border trade between the U.S. and Canada, was not a smart tactic, as the inconvenience it caused was unlikely to win any hearts and minds to their cause on either side of the border.
The bridge blockade has since been discontinued, but the truckers’ “occupation” of the capital area of Ottawa continues, causing major traffic jams.
If Mr. Trudeau were genuinely interested in ending the protest, he would cease and desist with the inflammatory rhetoric and negotiate with the truckers — who, it should be remembered, were until recently considered among the unsung heroes of the pandemic for working mightily to keep a hobbled economy on life-support.
Unfortunately, good-faith negotiations to end the mandates are unlikely with this budding Canadian caudillo who, upon Castro’s death in November 2016, perhaps not surprisingly, issued a statement mourning “with deep sorrow” the “loss of this remarkable leader.”
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