Canada’s ship of state is sinking. While U.S. president Donald Trump threatens massive damage to Canada’s economy through the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imported goods and further threatens our sovereignty by loudly proclaiming a desire to make Canada the 51st state, Canada’s parliament is at a standstill having been prorogued by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Prorogation followed months of parliamentary deadlock caused by Trudeau’s government refusing to surrender documents required by law to parliament.
The country also finds itself ill-prepared to respond to Trump’s threats but also to threats posed by China and Russia with regard to Canada’s sovereignty over the Arctic. In addition, there are manifold domestic issues including housing affordability, health care, crime, border security, and economic stagnation. The government’s pursuit of a climate change and woke identity politics agenda has resulted in policies that thwart economic growth and social mobility. Trudeau has effectively run the Canadian ship of state aground.
As the captain of the ship, Trudeau has demonstrated little to no competence and a penchant for making grand gestures while delivering little of substance. The nation has veered off its historically measured and successful course under Trudeau’s captaincy. Too far into the voyage, Canadians began to realize that things were going badly wrong and called out the government. Support for the Trudeau Liberals started to crumble. He blamed broad public dissatisfaction on the public’s own inability to grasp what a tremendous job he and his crew were doing. Trudeau denied that he was in any way responsible or that a correction was needed and instead doubled down on his talking points until, finally, his own caucus and senior ministers began to quit their watch and leave the bridge. When it became clear that the nation, and his own political career, were about to run aground, Trudeau prorogued parliament and jumped ship. While the ship continues to list badly, Trudeau carries on as if he is still at the helm and sailing in calm seas.
In January 2012 Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized after striking rocks off a Tuscan coastal island. While 4,200 people were saved in the ensuing rescue operation, 33 perished. The disaster, completely avoidable, occurred when the captain, Francesco Schettino, ordered the helmsman to swing the vessel closer to Giglio Island to execute a maritime salute that included sounding its horn. The maneuver was purely for show but went horribly wrong because the Indonesian helmsman and the Italian captain had difficulty communicating due to language differences. The helmsman steered the ship in the wrong direction and although Schettino ordered him to change course again it was too late, and the Costa Concordia struck some rocks, suffered a 53-metre tear in its hull, and began to take on water.
With a damaged rudder and no power, the ship veered toward the island, ran aground and began listing to the starboard (right) side. As the vessel drifted toward shore a frightened passenger called her daughter in Italy who, in turn, contacted the Italian coast guard. The latter called the Costa Concordia, but Schettino told them they had only experienced a blackout. The coast guard contacted the ship again minutes later and the captain replied that while they were taking on water, they only needed some tugboats.
About fifteen minutes after the first rescue vessel arrived, Schettino ordered that the ship be abandoned by all passengers and crew. The captain left the bridge twenty-five minutes later and soon left the vessel, later claiming that he fell off the ship and landed in a lifeboat. The last crew member left the bridge thirteen minutes later even though 300 people were still aboard. A coast guard captain ordered Schettino to return to the ship to supervise the rescue operation, but Schettino refused.
After more than 21 months of preparation culminating in a massive 19-hour salvage operation that required specially designed equipment and 500 people, the Costa Concordia was righted, removed and towed away to be scrapped.
Schettino was tried and convicted and, following an appeal, finally sentenced to 16 years in prison, but not before he held a panic management seminar in 2014 and published a book, The Submerged Truths, which he dedicated to those lost in the disaster and in which he cast himself as a hero.[1]
In a letter directed to a maritime safety conference in London in 2018, Schettino wrote from prison, “I have always stressed the importance of the Bridge Team efficiency and effectiveness. In my life I have never left things unplanned. Notwithstanding my attitude, that night I have experienced that a whole team of conning officers, three of them including a deck cadet while on duty at their radars and ECDIS stations, did not detect that the ship was running aground”.[2]
On two prior occasions, he was involved in maritime accidents that resulted in damage. A woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair was on the Costa Concordia’s bridge the night of the disaster.
The tragic story of the Costa Concordia is a parable that Canada should have paid careful attention to. The moral lesson it delivers is a simple one. A person who exhibits poor judgement, who asserts that all is well when demonstrably things are going badly awry, who denies responsibility for the disaster they have orchestrated, and who ultimately deserts their post when everything is all but lost should never have been given the role they had in the first place. Such people are not invisible. They are dilettantes and narcissists. They are glib when seriousness is required and at other times feign seriousness to obscure their shallowness and incompetence. They also surround themselves with sycophants who lack the moral courage to do the right thing until it is well past time to throw the engines into reverse and bring things back under control.
The solution to righting the Canadian ship of state and getting back under way is not to replace the captain with someone who sails using the same set of charts as the previous captain, who thinks themself heroic, and who similarly regards themself as above criticism or challenge from the same crew that served under the previous captain. The solution is to choose a captain and crew who understand that the whole vessel needs a refit and a new set of charts, and who collectively possess a full appreciation of the hazards that lie ahead but who are laser-focused on navigating those hazards to successfully reach the promised destination. A captain and crew who don’t have a predilection for grand gestures, preferring, instead, operational effectiveness.
To right the ship of state, Canadians needs to carefully consider the Costa Concordia parable, remove any trace of Canada’s own Captain Schettino and anyone who ever served on the bridge with him, and select a captain and crew ready and capable of beginning the wholesale refit and relaunch the country needs and deserves.
After more than nine years in power the Trudeau Liberals have failed to meet even the exceptionally low expectations critics and political opponents had for them going into and following the 2015 federal election. Their fiscal record is appalling. After declaring that “Canada is back” Trudeau’s international profile soared, but our reputation globally has since fallen to the ground like smuts from a Canada Day firework. They are painfully ‘woke,’ fueling grievances by relentlessly stoking a narrative of colonial oppression, white privilege, gender discrimination and a host of other ‘isms.’ They are operationally ineffective, bend feebly to bullying from both China and the U.S., and are obsessed with a range of policy interests such as battling climate change, ending systemic racism, or addressing income inequality that ultimately can be reduced to a single ambition – the rendering of the chimera that is woke social justice.
Critically, for their ongoing political survival, they have one core competency; they have mastered the creation and dissemination of a narrative that paints their political opponents, in fact anyone who disagrees with them or criticizes them, as the ‘other,’ and portrays Liberals as the sole arbiters of truth and all that is right and virtuous. They also benefit from a captive media in the form of a state-owned broadcaster funded with an annual $1.5 billion stipend and an array of privately owned media companies that rely on the government for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual payroll subsidies. Warnings were issued, even from within the entities that would benefit, when the decision to bail out legacy media companies was being considered. Those warnings were not heeded, and the outcome has been pretty much as predicted; traditional media outlets in Canada appear, at a minimum, to be seriously compromised in terms of their ability and willingness to challenge the government and, at worst, appear to be fully complicit in painting and erecting the façade that hides from view this government’s true state of corruption.
To argue that this government is corrupt is not to imply that they are routinely engaged in unlawful activities where special favours are dispensed to friends of the administration in exchange for large sums of money, although the lingering stench from the SNC/Lavalin and WE Charity scandals, to name just two of many, suggests that such exchanges are entirely within the realm of possibility. The argument here is that the government is corrupt because it does not engage honestly or in good faith with the public it was elected to serve. It is entirely corrupt in its purpose which is only to retain power. It is corrupt in its belief that it alone possesses righteous virtue and that its opponents are not only wrong in their thinking and own beliefs, but also evil. Key members of this government are so manifestly corrupt it appears that they believe their own lies and are completely untroubled by any cognitive dissonance their actions would normally provoke in someone acting with any moral agency.
The rot which permeates the Trudeau Liberal government was brought into sharp focus by its handling of the truckers’ ‘Freedom Convoy’ in early 2022. The initial response was pure Liberal playbook; Justin Trudeau denigrated, demeaned, and dismissed the protesters and their concerns during a press conference describing them as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” At that point, the Convoy was still assembling across the country and making its way to Ottawa. Television coverage suggested that it looked like being more than just a fringe minority as lines of trucks took to the nation’s highways and crowds of supporters cheered them on from the roadside or overpasses as the Convoy rolled by.
The fragmented protest leadership was collectively a politically naïve group to the point that one faction arrived in Ottawa bearing a “memorandum of understanding” expressing their belief that a committee could be formed between the protesters, the Senate, and the Governor General to revoke vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions. They also suggested a governing coalition between the Conservatives, NDP, Bloc, and the protesters could be formed. The idea that an unelected group could insert itself into the parliamentary process belies a fundamental lack of understanding of how Canada’s democracy works. To their credit, when they realized their ill-formed plans to engage the government as some sort of partner were never going to fly, they did not resort to violence but only committed to wait things out. Presumably they were hoping the government’s resolve to ignore their other, more pragmatic demands would disintegrate.
It’s worth noting that although the media pushed a narrative that the Convoy was essentially an anti-vax protest, and many people still adhere to that narrow perspective, it was also very much a general backlash against Justin Trudeau and his government’s woke agenda. Convoy protesters and supporters understood that Trudeau was using the pandemic as a political wedge, even if they did not explicitly articulate that understanding. The legacy media were happy to hold the wedge while the government hammered on it to further divide the country.
The government’s subsequent actions were also straight out of the Liberals’ incredibly thin but remarkably effective playbook. They refused to engage meaningfully with Convoy representatives and continued to demean the protesters and anyone who showed any interest in the protest, let alone actual support. The Liberals’ rhetoric soon rose to a fever pitch. Here was an opportunity to provoke a Canadian ‘January 6th’ moment, our own domestic ‘insurrection’ which could be used indefinitely to reinforce their ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ narrative.
Frustratingly, for Trudeau and the Liberals, the Convoy protesters failed to take the bait or to independently commit any acts of sedition, destroy public property, storm parliament, or engage violently with the police or public. The government, recognizing that the Convoy protesters had little interest in giving them the moment they were seeking, decided to manufacture a crisis by orchestrating a draconian response that can reasonably be likened to crushing an ant with a hammer. Their hope in this was to convince the public that they were capable of swift and decisive action and that by invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) the Convoy was a far greater threat to the nation’s survival than a reasonably curious person might have concluded it to be.
And it worked. With full support from the NDP, and untroubled acceptance by mainstream media government stenographers of the need for the extraordinary powers the EA granted the government, the clearance of the Convoy from Ottawa’s streets was carried out by the heavily reinforced Ottawa police in short order. The EA was quickly suspended, despite the Liberals’ initial claims that it might be required for some time, when it appeared the Senate might not pass it and that a number of civil liberties groups were launching court challenges. The party and its allies subsequently went to work forging a supporting narrative.
The present government misses few opportunities to sow division. Just listen to what Trudeau or any of his Ministers say on any topic in the House of Commons, during public events, or in the tightly controlled exchanges with the media favoured by this government. The structure, language, etc., follow a strict format used to continually hammer away at the same themes. “We know,” or “Canadians expect,” or “that’s exactly what we’ve been doing and Conservatives and the extreme right oppose it” are all standard, endlessly repeated phrases used to bracket vacuous non-answers to questions posed.
Governments in power have two core goals; to maintain office; and to develop and execute a set of policies that they believe will best serve the interests of the nation they govern. Presumably, people enter politics because they have conviction that they understand the challenges facing the state, have constructive ideas about how to address them, and believe their approach would be in the best interests of society at large. Viewed through an organizational lens and considering the transactional nature of government, the political side, gaining and maintaining office, is marketing, while the administrative side, running the country, is product. A seated government that is reasonably competent and manages to resolve issues and move things forward has an advantage over its opposition. It has a product that is marketable and so can run on its record. It is easier to sell any kind of product when consumers are both familiar and reasonably satisfied with brand and product attributes. It is more difficult to sell a product when consumers tire of the brand and the product on offer is lacklustre or, worse, simply doesn’t work.
To their credit, the Liberals in 2015 managed to inject their brand and their product with a perceived freshness sufficient to overcome the fading brand but reasonably solid product offering of the Conservatives. The corruption of the Trudeau Liberals was already surfacing in 2015. Their success was partly due to their efforts to demonize Stephen Harper and the Conservative party. They also managed to present a deficit-financed ‘progressive’ agenda as providing necessary stimulus to combat a recession largely of their own imagining. They claimed their small deficits were both necessary and benign and would help Canadians avoid the hardships that Conservative and NDP plans to balance the books would yield. After nine years in office, the Harper government’s welcome was wearing thin, and the apparent youthful dynamism of Trudeau won the day convincingly.
Since then, the Trudeau Liberals shifted to hard and relentless demonization of their political opponents but also the demonization of media outlets and ordinary citizens who disagree with them. They could not run on their record in the 2019 election because it was so dismal, and when photos of Trudeau’s earlier career as a Blackface minstrelsy performer surfaced, they immediately constructed a lie that then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was planning to restrict access to abortion if elected, a lie that the captive media picked up and ran with.
The 2021 election was pure opportunism, initiated by the Liberals because they believed that polling a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic indicated a majority was well within reach. During the pandemic, with parliament suspended or convened virtually, the Liberals had the luxury of even more fully controlling the narrative than usual. Trudeau appeared daily on the front steps of Rideau Cottage, the temporary residence of the Prime Minister. One of the challenges faced by other party leaders, at least outside of election periods, is competing with the incumbent Prime Minister for media exposure. It’s hard to imagine any other Canadian Prime Minister has had his image reproduced so regularly in the media than has Justin Trudeau. The opposition leaders, with Parliament suspended, all but disappeared from view during the pandemic while Trudeau’s exposure increased. Many of his daily sessions were almost completely devoid of content, which arguably isn’t much of a change from his pre- and post-pandemic exchanges with the public or media, but the Liberals clearly sought to exploit the frequency of those exchanges to their political advantage.
Trudeau showed his true colours in the 2021 election when, in the face of lacklustre polling numbers, he pivoted from his initial position on COVID vaccine mandates and began to vilify citizens who chose not to get vaccinated. In early February 2022 as the Convoy protest continued in Ottawa, Quebec Liberal MP Joel Lightbound expressed dissent over the direction taken by the Liberal leadership, something that virtually no active backbenchers had, up to that point, dared during the government’s tenure. While asking that the protesters leave Ottawa, Lightbound suggested there was no precedent for the division seen at the time.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people wondering why just a year ago, we were all united, in this together. And now that we have one of the most vaccinated populations in the world, we’ve never been so divided.” Lightbound said he noticed that “both the tone and the policies” of his government changed “drastically on the eve and during the last election campaign.”
“From a positive and unifying approach, a decision was made to wedge, to divide and to stigmatize. I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.”[i]
Lightbound was immediately called to meet with the whip of the Liberal caucus, Steven MacKinnon, and resigned as chair of the Quebec Liberal caucus the same day. MacKinnon offered that “He (Lightbound) has expressed clear confidence in the government and remains a member of the Liberal caucus.”[ii] Accusing the government of intentionally choosing to “wedge, to divide and to stigmatize” is a strange way to express “clear confidence” in that body but MacKinnon’s response is nothing if not a standard political effort to stamp out a fire before it spreads. More remarkably, with the apparent abundance of incendiary material hidden behind the façade of respectability so carefully crafted by this government, no other fires threatened to erupt within the Liberal caucus, which speaks to how comprehensive the rot is within the party.
Following the invocation of the EA, the stain of the government’s corruption continued to spread. Within the EA are requirements that, “The Governor in Council shall, within sixty days after the expiration or revocation of a declaration of emergency, cause an inquiry to be held into the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency.” And, “A report of an inquiry held pursuant to this section shall be laid before each House of Parliament within three hundred and sixty days after the expiration or revocation of the declaration of emergency.” [iii] The Trudeau government announced the inquiry as if it were a magnanimous act of openness and transparency rather than a statutory requirement. They also sought to frame it as an inquisition into the Convoy itself rather than an exploration of why the EA was invoked and whether or not invocation met the threshold definition of an emergency that is outlined in the Act.
The government’s chosen appointee as Commissioner of the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) was Justice Paul Rouleau. A justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Rouleau has a long and distinguished career in the legal profession. He also has long ties to the Liberal Party of Canada, including being a part of Liberal Prime Minister John Turner’s leadership campaign where he served as Turner’s executive assistant. He was appointed to the bench by another Liberal Prime Minister, Paul Martin, and is a long-time member and supporter of the party. This history and his affiliations do not mean that it should be assumed Rouleau is incapable of being non-partisan, but the optics of his appointment were not good. As has often been observed, the appearance of a conflict of interest is just as damning as a proven conflict of interest. Who can say whether Trudeau and his cabinet honestly believed the selection of Rouleau was beyond questioning or they were simply thumbing their noses at their critics and opponents, but it is fair to say that a government guided by a strong moral and ethical compass would not have made that choice.
Justice Rouleau did a remarkably good job conducting the POEC hearing and also in delivering his report within a punishing timeline. The hearings were broadcast live and virtually all the key actors made an appearance, including the Prime Minister who closed out the show and delivered what was arguably one of his best performances as an amateur thespian in public office. After days of testimony where the salient facts were re-established, i.e., that the protests were peaceful, that no rioting, looting, or physical assaults were recorded during the ‘occupation’ of Ottawa, that local policing failed and, in fact, even enabled the Convoy to embed itself in the downtown and parliamentary precincts of Ottawa, that the protest was loud, boisterous, and a major inconvenience and cause of discomfort for local residents, and, perhaps most importantly, that no police force or security agency identified the Convoy protest as a threat to national security and they therefore did not request the federal government to invoke the EA.
Perhaps the testimony at the POEC hearing that best exemplified the corrupt intentions of the Trudeau government was that of then-Attorney-General David Lametti. Lametti revealed that “(w)ithin the first week of protests gridlocking Ottawa, he was already raising the idea of invoking the Emergencies Act and said the Canadian Armed Forces might be “necessary” to end the protests.”[iv] Lametti also told Justice Rouleau, “he would have to trust that federal officials acted in good faith when they invoked the act because the government is not releasing the legal advice behind its decision.”[v] The legal advice received by the government was provided by Lametti himself. The government’s decision to partially waive cabinet confidence but to retain solicitor-client privilege resulted in an “absence of transparency” according to senior commission lawyer, Gordon Cameron. He further said that the lack of transparency “presents a “conundrum” as the inquiry tries to “lift the veil that has made such a black box” of a central issue facing the inquiry – namely whether the decision to invoke the act was reasonable and appropriate.”[vi]
Given that the primary justification for invoking the act was kept under wraps by the government it should come as no surprise that Justice Rouleau issued his ruling with a significant caveat. Toward the close of Lametti’s testimony Rouleau addressed the problem in an exchange with Lametti:
Justice Rouleau asked how the commission can assess the reasonableness of the government’s decision “when we don’t know what they were acting on?”
Mr. Lametti replied that the federal government has done its best to provide information. He said the commission has already heard “some indication” of its views on the legal standards and more will come through the legal arguments in final submissions.
Justice Rouleau said that while closing arguments are helpful, what he still doesn’t know is “the belief of those who made the decision as to what the law was” at the time.
“And I guess, the answer is we just assume they acted in good faith in application of whatever they were told. Is that sort of what you’re saying?” Justice Rouleau asked.
In the 2,000-plus page final report of the POEC Rouleau wrote that the commission “does not have the legal authority to render a formal judgment on the ‘lawfulness’ of the measures” and so his choice of the preferred standard of “appropriateness” was a more “open-textured standard that permits me to assess the measures holistically.” He further added he did not “intend or consider (his) findings on this topic to be in any sense binding on the courts.” Using this amorphous standard of his own devising, Rouleau declared that the government had met the high threshold required by the act for its invocation but that he did not “come to this conclusion easily” and did “not consider the factual basis to be overwhelming” while also asserting that “there is significant strength to the arguments against reaching it.”[viii]
To summarize, Justice Rouleau conducted an exhaustive examination the facts of which failed to unequivocally support the conclusion he delivered, which he himself acknowledged. He effectively relied on the government’s own appraisal of the appropriateness of its actions to reach his conclusion even though the government refused to share the “legal argument” upon which the government claimed its decision rested. Rouleau may not have wilfully chosen to do so, but aiding and abetting Trudeau Liberal corruption is ultimately what he did.
The POEC inquiry’s mandate was never to determine the constitutionality of the EA’s invocation, it was only meant to determine why it was invoked and if that action was justified by facts on the ground. Rouleau’s opinion had no legal force, and the government faced no sanctions beyond a possible public humiliation if his findings went against the government’s reasoning and actions. Civil liberties advocacy groups, realizing that the government was likely to escape accountability, were quick to file court challenges to the government’s actions within days of the EA’s invocation. Those challenges, arguing that the government’s actions were not legally justified, were heard by the Federal Court in the first week of April 2023, just over a year after the EA was invoked. Interestingly, lawyers for the government were citing Justice Rouleau’s findings as if they were, in fact, legal judgements, likely because they had little else with which to defend the government’s position.
On January 23, 2024, the Federal Court found the Trudeau Government’s use of the EA illegal and unconstitutional. In his ruling, Justice Richard Mosley found that “Cabinet’s invocation of the Act in February 2022 was not reasonable for two reasons.”[ix] The first was that Cabinet failed to meet the requirement “under section 3 of the Act that emergencies only be declared where a situation cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”[x]
“Second, the requirement of reasonable grounds to believe that Canada faced “threats to the security of Canada” had not been met. Section 17 of the Act states that “threats to the security of Canada” has the same meaning as it has under section 2(c) of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act (the “CSIS Act”), which includes threats like terrorism, espionage and attempts to overthrow the government. Justice Mosley said that this does not include the “economic disruption that resulted from the border crossing blockades, troubling as they were.”[xi]
“Justice Mosley found violations of Charter sections 2(b) and 8, and said that those violations were not minimally impairing and therefore not justified under section 1 of the Charter, the reasonable limits clause.”[xii] In short, the charter rights of Freedom Convoy participants were, in no small way, violated to serve the political interests of the government. Immediately upon the delivery of Justice Mosley’s decision, then-Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the Trudeau government would be appealing the ruling. Attempting to justify the government’s decision to appeal, Freeland stated that national security had been threatened including Canada’s economic security. The Canadian Constitution Foundation noted in its summary of Justice Mosley’s ruling that “economic harm” is not included in the threshold to be met in order to invoke the Act. The government had also argued that Cabinet is owed extraordinary deference with respect to determining whether an emergency exists. While Justice Mosley acknowledged that Cabinet requires the ability to react swiftly to a rapidly changing situation it must still adhere to the objective thresholds that are written into the Act. The government’s appeal will be heard in early February 2025.
I started drafting this essay in 2022 in the aftermath of the Convoy when the thought struck me that all of the poor policy decisions of the government, its obvious ineptitude, the growing list of scandals large and small, all hinted at a central problem; the government had no interest in effective governance. Its sole interest lay in the imposition of its woke agenda. That agenda, from the outset, had been camouflaged using tried and true centrist Liberal sloganeering. This subterfuge deceived not only the wider public but the broader Liberal caucus, the majority of MPs and party apparatchiks who were not members of the insider group within the PMO for whom retaining power was all that mattered. Because it was Trudeau’s cult of personality that had given the majority of Cabinet and the caucus their purported power and authority, they did as they were instructed and clapped liked seals when the occasion demanded. The enterprise was not only corrupt when it first took office in 2015 but even before that when Trudeau took the reins of the Liberal party.
There were already tears in the fabric of the façade in 2022 when Trudeau was a few months into leading his second consecutive minority government. The Freedom Convoy was a pivotal event, a turning point. Not in the sense that large numbers of Liberal supporters suddenly had an epiphany and turned on the government. That didn’t happen, but the Convoy did help to sow the seeds of doubt, and slowly more and more people began to question the government’s endlessly repeated talking points and the legacy media’s regurgitation of the same. Anyone paying attention in January and February saw that what was actually taking place on the streets of Ottawa and how that story was being told did not align.
The Freedom Convoy and the government’s response to it are still continually referenced by both sides in Canada’s notably polarized political discourse. Justin Trudeau perhaps set the frame for this division of opinion on February 1, 2022, shortly after the Convoy had parked their rigs in the streets of Ottawa when he Tweeted, “(T)oday in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.” Convoy participants and supporters, whom Globe And Mail columnist and CBC ‘At Issue’ panel member, Andrew Coyne, labelled as “yobs,” continued to, and still wave “F*ck Trudeau” flags. There have been few signs of forgiveness from either side, but from 2022 until Trudeau’s calamitous resignation on January 6, 2025, the government’s carefully erected façade has been gradually torn to shreds. Even the CBC’s pundits have begun to heap scorn on Trudeau and his miserable legacy.
How the Trudeau Liberals responded to the Freedom Convoy is just one example of how every issue, every policy initiative was always, first and foremost, analyzed to determine how it could be exploited for political gain and to serve the agenda of Justin Trudeau and his ever-shrinking circle of insiders. Although it now seems an age ago, Canadians will remember that just prior to the pandemic the country was gripped by protests of Indigenous peoples and self-identifying “allies” aimed at stopping the Coastal GasLink pipeline project in British Columbia. Hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation opposed the project but 20 elected councils representing a likely majority of members of the various affected First Nations had signed agreements with TC Energy Corp, the owners of the project. The protestors successfully shut down CN Rail’s eastern network as well as obstructing other rail lines and port facilities. Protestors, primarily non-indigenous, self-styled eco-justice warriors, had also been continuously waging a battle in the forests of B.C., setting up camps and blockades on access roads to pipeline project work sites.
Over a couple of weeks, with threats of violence escalating and real economic impacts being felt, the Trudeau government resisted calls to forcefully end the blockades and instead trumpeted the need for dialogue. There was no denigration of the protesters by Trudeau, no talk or move to invoke the EA and, in the aftermath of the protest, far less fervent efforts to prosecute protesters who ‘crossed the line’ in the eyes of the government than has been experienced by Freedom Convoy organizers. This inconsistency further speaks to the corrupt motives and actions of the government when confronted with acts of civil disobedience. It is not whether specific acts of protest objectively violate our laws that determines how the government responds, but the presumed politics of the protest groups involved and what kind of a political opportunity can be exploited at their expense.
Possibly the ugliest part of Trudeau’s legacy is how deeply polarized we have become. Some of this may be due to the reordering of the middle class. Only a few decades ago, blue collar and white collar workers were neighbours who enjoyed roughly similar economic prospects, political perspectives, and social values. Today, they live in different Canadas. White collar, university-educated urban elites embrace ‘progressive’ views while blue collar workers whose prospects have narrowed are less enthusiastic about the political and social direction taken by the country in recent years. The scorn and anger of progressives directed toward what many refer to as the “Freedumb Convoy” is palpable. Justin Trudeau did nothing to bank their ire, rather, he only stoked it with his “fringe minority with unacceptable views” comments before the Convoy had even arrived in Ottawa. Now, the country seems to have shifted and, if polling is to be believed, the majority of Canadians are now more aligned with the views of Convoy participants and supporters, even if they would be unwilling to give the Convoy any credit for nudging a shift in their perspective. The only positive is that the wheels have finally come off, but the tumult and damage will continue for some time. It will take something more than a fresh helping of “sunny ways” to bleach out the stain of a decade of corruption.
[1] ‘We’re more divided than ever’: Liberal MP breaks ranks and criticizes public health policies, Catherine Lévesque, National Post, February 8, 2022.
[1] Ibid.
[1] Emergencies Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. 22 (4th Supp.)) Sec. 63 (1) and 63 (2)
[1] Attorney-General suggested Emergencies Act in first week of Ottawa protest, texts reveal, Marieke Walsh, Marsha McLeod, Globe and Mail, November 23, 2022
[1] Ibid.
[1] Ibid.
[1] Ibid.
[1] The Emergencies Act threshold is now incompetence, apparently, Aaron Wudrick, National Post, February 22, 2023
[1] Federal Court finds Emergencies Act invocation violated rights, was unreasonable, Canadian Constitution Foundation, January 23, 2024
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