Justin Trudeau Revokes Emergencies Act

Breaking news: Justin Trudeau announced this afternoon that he is revoking the Emergencies Act, just two days after getting it passed in the House of Commons. From The National Post:

Trudeau credited the end of the downtown Ottawa protests with cabinet’s decision to revoke the measures, a move he said was needed to end the illegal occupation and clear streets from dozens of parked vehicles and big rigs. “We are confident that existing laws and bylaws are now sufficient to keep people safe,” Trudeau said during the press conference, adding Ottawa will continue supporting local police and authorities

This is good news, of course, but it is also worth noting that his justification for this move makes exactly zero sense. "Existing laws and bylaws" were always sufficient to keep people safe while handling the protestors in Ottawa just as they were sufficient to deal with the border blockades some truckers set up for a time earlier in the protest. And the protests in Ottawa had already ended when Trudeau put the Emergencies Act up for a vote in parliament which was, let me reiterate, only two days ago.

So what has changed? Well, I think it is safe to assume that there were three pressure points which made Trudeau and the Liberals crack.

First, polling. Much was made as the protestors were being cleared out this past weekend of the polling which found that two-thirds of Canadians supported Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act. But public polling since that time has been more divided. Very likely the images coming out of Ottawa of baton-wielding cops in riot gear getting rough with peaceful protestors and mounted officers trampling them made people more conflicted.

But even the initial poll requires a deeper reading. It also found the same percentage of people who supported Trudeau's measures saying they “fear for the future of Canada,” and nearly as many said, “they have lost faith in the ability of the country to keep peace, order and good government in place.” For a majority of Canadians, the protests had become an emblem of their country in chaos. Now that the protests are over, they are likely to turn on the man responsible. My guess is that that's exactly what Trudeau's internal polling is telling him.

Second, international opinion. Canadians are extremely proud of their standing in the international community. The smallest G7 country by a wide margin, Canada has long been known as a country that "punches above its weight." But the international reaction to Trudeau's handling of the protests has been brutal. The English speaking world has been treated to a long train of headlines slamming Trudeau and wondering how Canada could go so far down this path. "Trudeau’s Destructive ‘Emergency,’" "Justin Trudeau Has Disgraced His Office," "Police forces in Canada scrutinized for excessive violence with peaceful Freedom Convoy protesters,""Justin Trudeau's Ceauşescu Moment" (referring to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu), and on and on. It was relentless. The CBC can cover for the prime minister all it wants. Sooner or later what the rest of the world is saying is going to bleed through.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly there is the upcoming Emergencies Act vote in the Canadian Senate. The senators had their first debate on the Act yesterday and many of them sounded reluctant to give the government a win:

Many wanted to know on what basis the government decided to invoke the Emergencies Act in the first place. That information has not been made available to Parliament, most notably ongoing investigations and intelligence information. Senator Dennis Glen Patterson said: “there is a certain amount of ‘trust us’ in the government’s justification of these extreme measures.”

“This is a serious step that we’re contemplating here today,” said Conservative Senator Elizabeth Marshall. “What exactly happened that the government decided to invoke the act? Because it seemed like for three or four weeks, there was nothing, they were just tolerating it.” She continued to ask why the government appeared “to be so late in assessing this monumental threat that they’re talking about.”

Conservative Senator Leo Housakos accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stoking the “flames of division” in refusing to speak to the protesters who occupied the streets of Ottawa and calling them names such as “marchers with swastikas” and “defenders of Nazism.”

The potential humiliation of losing this historic vote in the senate was likely enough to convince Trudeau to revoke his use of the act. Senator Denise Batters, in particular, tore him apart in a wide-ranging speech on the senate floor which deserves to be watched in full.

Of course, this whole episode has been a humiliation for Trudeau and for Canada as well. It will dog him for the rest of his career, one that is hopefully cut short by the voters, who are sick and tired of being ruled by a tin-pot dictator.

THE COLUMN: From Behind the Unreasoning Mask

Thus spake Captain Ahab:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? 

So now the mask slips and the truth is revealed: it was never about masks, or Covid, or "the science" at all. It was always—and always will be—about power. The Long March through the Institutions, the hallmark of the Frankfurt School's assault on the Western democracies, has now claimed its latest and thus far biggest prize. 

Who had the collapse of Canada as a functioning democracy on his bingo card? It was disheartening enough when Australia (with a "conservative" prime minister) fell, and that disarmed and benighted nation quickly transformed from the land of Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee back into the British penal colony it always was. 

But Canada? Granted, what became in 1867 the Dominion of Canada was comprised in part by American loyalists who rejected the separation from the motherland in the late 18th century and moved northward. Canadians also rightfully resented American incursions into their territory during the War of 1812 (a war much celebrated in Canada and totally ignored in the United States as the embarrassing mess it was). But since then, Canada has been America's closest ally. Canadians have long distinguished themselves in war, especially during World War I, where their service at Passchendaele, Ypres, and the Somme has become the stuff of military legend. Until the pestiferous arrival of Justin Trudeau as prime minister, no two countries were closer or had a more amicable relationship than Canada and the U.S.

Who is that masked man, really?

Now, in the blink of an eye, that relationship has been imperiled by Trudeau's abrogation of representative, parliamentary democracy via his mini-Machtergreifung last week. In this outrageous and disgraceful action he has been aided and abetted by his deputy prime minister (and finance minister) Chrystia Freeland (Harvard, Rhodes scholar), whose journalist grandfather was reportedly a Nazi collaborator during the war. Coincidentally she is married to a reporter for the New York Times, and is a former journalist herself. Of Ukrainian descent on her mother's side, the steely, multi-lingual Freeland has emerged as She Who Brings Down the Hammer:

In her remarks following Trudeau's act of nation-destroying pique, she said this:

Around the world, liberal democracies have been facing serious and sustained threats. We may have thought – we may have hoped – that Canada would be spared. Over the past two and a half weeks, we have learned that it is not. This occupation and these blockades are causing serious harm to our economy, to our democratic institutions, and to Canada’s international standing... That is why our government is taking action. We are resolute and determined. These illegal blockades must and will end. What we are facing today is a threat to our democratic institutions, to our economy, and to peace, order, and good government in Canada. This is unacceptable. It cannot stand and it will not stand.

"Our democracy," indeed. A dedicated leftist, Freeland is a member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, the most dangerous threat to real democracy and freedom in the world today. Led by Klaus Schwab, whose Strangelovian accent would make Laurence Olivier's demented dentist Dr. Szell blush, the WEF is the force behind the Great Reset, a cross between the dystopian visions of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as run by Daddy Warbucks and Dr. Evil.

Like SPECTRE, Schwab and his Resetters (whose numbers include, of course, Britain's Prince Charles, the scion of a family of anglicized Germans who trace their lineage back to the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg und Gotha), seek nothing less than global power and influence—and in fact have already achieved it:

The punitive reaction to the Freedom Convoy was only unexpected in its timing. While most Western governments have been relatively silent regarding Trudeau's sudden coup, the media has generally cheered, reflecting their Ivy League loathing of the working classes and their lip service to republican democracy. Just as they celebrated the fiery, "mostly peaceful" BLM and Antifa riots during the summer of 2020, so they've (baselessly, to use one of their favorite words) depicted the truckers as racists and Nazis, taking their cues in that regard from Trudeau himself. 

The Wall Street Journal naturally opposed the move: 

Protests aren’t emergencies, and Western leaders had better get used to handling civil disobedience firmly without traducing civil liberties. Mr. Trudeau criminalized a protest movement, deputizing financial institutions, without due process or liability, to find and freeze personal accounts of blockaders and anyone who helps them. These extraordinary measures are a needless abuse of power.

When the Emergencies Act was first passed, critics were assured “emergency powers can only be used when the situation is so drastic that no other law of Canada can deal with the situation.” In abusing these powers for a nonemergency, Mr. Trudeau crossed a democratic line. Canadians wanted the blockades to end, but it never should have come at the expense of the rule of law.

Amazingly, and to its credit, so did the editorial board of the New York Times, meekly defending the right of peaceful protest, something Trudeau, Jr., had once claimed to champion:

We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support. Governments have a responsibility to prevent violence by protesters, but they must be willing to accept some degree of disruption by those seeking to be heard. The challenge for public officials — the same one faced by Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 during the protests after the murder of George Floyd — is to maintain a balance between public health and safety and a functioning society, with the right to free expression. Entertaining the use of force to disperse or contain legal protests is wrong. As Mr. Trudeau said in November 2020, in expressing his support of a yearlong protest by farmers in India that blocked major highways to New Delhi, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.”

One of the obstacles to understanding the malign intentions of the Davoisie and its fellow travelers in this mésalliance of corporate leaders and government officials—one of the textbook characteristics of Fascism, along with the employment of private militias to subvert the democratic process—is the highly successful campaign the international Left has waged since the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact under exigent circumstances in 1941, mostly via the media, to convince you that National Socialist Germany and the international Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were somehow antithetical, when in fact they were two sides of the same hellish coin. The nickname "Nazi" (almost never used by the members of the NSDAP themselves) derives from the first two syllables of the German word for "national," and was used to distinguish National Socialists from the "Sozis" in common parlance. 

Today, the bonzes of the WEF hide behind their ostensible capitalism and stupefying wealth to deflect any notion that they are aligned and allied with the international Left: how can we be both pro-capitalist and pro-communist at the same time? (Maybe they should ask Davos regular and former Nazi collaborator, George Soros.)

The sad and sobering part is that some two-thirds of Canadians approve of the Trudeau government's curtailment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; freedom of peaceful assembly; and freedom of association. But as in Britain, Ireland, Australia, and the U.S. Canada's major media are strongly pro-government (as long as that government tilts left) and will not brook any opposition to their love of internationalism. If that means rights have to be shelved "for a limited time," well you know the old saw about omelets and eggs. It only took two years to end "two weeks to flatten the curve."

As Ahab says in the passage quoted above, from Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck," of Moby Dick: "If man will strike, strike through the dumb mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?"

How indeed? Especially when the wall strikes back.

Who Is Justin Trudeau?

It is now common knowledge that Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, a former part-time high school teacher, snowboard instructor, and two-time university dropout—Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal, failing to complete degrees in either faculty—is not and never was leadership material.

If one studies the checkered history of Canada’s prime ministers from Sir John A. Macdonald to the present moment, one finds the inevitable gallery of eccentrics, short-lived tenants and corrupt operators among them, but none so feckless and inept, so morally impaired and puerile, in short, so unfit for office as the current occupant of 24 Sussex—that is, when he is not sojourning in his Harrington Lake country residence or governing from the Rideau Cottage steps.

Except truckers.

He has had, of course, his supporters and fawning acolytes charmed by comparative youth and apparent insouciance, at least during the early days of his candidacy. Jonathan Kay’s hagiographic extravagance in an article for The Walrus titled “The Justin Trudeau I Can’t Forget,” and Conrad Black’s praise of Trudeau in the National Post as “flexible in public finance… a very alluring personality, a quick intelligence and an apparently reasonable combination of principle and openness” are cases in point. Perhaps these magisters are now experiencing buyer’s remorse.

Justin Trudeau’s track record as prime minister of Canada is, to put it mildly, far from stellar.

Moreover, Trudeau’s clownish antics in blackface, his Peter Sellers imitation on a diplomatic visit to India, even his virtue-signaling rainbow socks at a Gay Pride parade are nothing if not national embarrassments. But all of his policy aberrations and cringeworthy absurdities count for little in the light of his latest adventure in political grotesquery.   

Vox populi, vox Dei.

His seizure of dictatorial powers via the Emergencies Act to disable a peaceful, legitimate and justifiable protest against the vaccine mandates and cross-border quarantine measures by a contingent of the country’s truckers is only the latest manifestation of this failed and oppressive Trudeau-led government.

As National Post columnist Rex Murphy writes, it is “something very close to lunatic.” The Act is by no means unexpected and was bound at some point to happen, a reprise of the elder Trudeau’s invoking of the War Measures Act against a small cadre of Quebec separatists. Like father, like son. It is an expression of a demagogic temperament that cannot tolerate opposition and that has no talent for compromise or dialogue, a sine qua non for prudent and respectable leadership, now conspicuous by its absence.

Indeed, his outrageous slandering of the truckers as racists and haters, his refusal to meet with them, his craven flight from office as the convoy assembled in Ottawa, and his invoking of legislation to seize the financial instruments and assets of both the protesters and of ordinary citizens who contributed to the trucker fund is unprecedented in Canadian history. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has brazenly authorized the RCMP to share with banks “the names of individuals, businesses and crypto wallets associated with the protest convoy.”

The peoples' choice.

As of this writing, the banks now have the power to freeze protesters’ accounts, including, it appears, the accounts of people who over the last two weeks donated in good faith. The retroactive application of fiscal reprisals is an egregious violation of legal norms, as is the sequestration order itself. It is a sign of unmitigated tyranny that compares with the typical excesses of the totalitarian despots Trudeau reveres. It seems to be a truism that small men with power are the scourge of their nations.

This is the man whom Canadians have thrice elected, which speaks for a country that—with the exception of a courageous and steadfast minority—no longer values its freedoms and traditions. Fear and ignorance triumph over patriotism and reason. Some might be inclined to argue that Canadians had little choice given there was no credible opposition and that vote-heavy Toronto, Montreal and Halifax effectively determine the outcomes of elections in this country. Nonetheless, Trudeau was always a popular favorite despite his autocratic nature and a clear tendency to abuse his office. Trudeau is working to remake Canada in his own tarnished image. He can do no other. That is who he is.

Trudeau Invokes 'Emergencies Act'

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided to invoke the Emergencies Act to end the ongoing Freedom Convoy protests in Canada. He will submit the decision for the approval of parliament sometime this week. New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh has already announced his party's intention to support the government, meaning that the prime minister will have the votes he needs.

"It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law enforcement's ability to effectively enforce the law," Trudeau told a news conference Monday afternoon. "It is no longer a lawful protest at a disagreement over government policy. It is now an illegal occupation. It's time for people to go home. This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people's jobs and restoring confidence in our institutions," he said.

The Emergencies Act is a successor to the War Measures Act, which was famously invoked only once during peacetime -- Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, made use of it during the October Crisis of 1970, after FLQ terrorists kidnapped the deputy premier of Quebec and a British diplomat with the goal of achieving independence for Quebec. The Emergencies Act, like its predecessor, grants the prime minister authority to severely restrict civil liberties for a time in order to restore order and protect the national welfare, though it gives parliament somewhat greater oversight than the earlier legislation.

The Act also allows the central government to go after crowdfunding platforms, such as GiveSendGo, which has been collecting on behalf of the truckers. That site is currently down, perhaps as a result of hacking.

The fundraising website used to raise millions of dollars for a “Freedom Convoy” protest led by truckers against coronavirus restrictions in Canada is offline after reports of a possible hack that exposed donor information. On Monday, a screenshot of the GiveSendGo website featured an image from the Disney film “Frozen,” along with a ticker purporting to show the names, donation amounts and email addresses of people who helped support the cause. The image bore the words “GiveSendGo is now frozen,” along with a link describing raw donation data.

A video captured by Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News reporter Travis Dhanraj shows scrolling text addressed to “GiveSendGo Grifters and Hatriots.”

This act of pique, petulance, and impotent frustration is completely unnecessary. As Greg Taylor explains in Canada's National Post:

Section 3 of the Act defines a national emergency as “an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that … seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.”

The protestors have been peaceful, and the blockaded bridges have already begun to clear with only a handful of arrests having taken place so far. Moreover, constitutionally, dealing with protestors is very much within the realm of provincial authority.

One thing that invoking the Emergencies Act does do, however, is create the potentiality for military involvement. Trudeau has said that he has no plans thus far to bring in the military. But the prime minister is desperate, and if marching the military into Ottawa to clear out the protestors will end this, he will absolutely do so and take what he likely thinks is a short term hit in his national standing to make the problem go away.

But another, more subtle but just as ominous, use of the Emergencies Act concerns the government's broad ability to regulate financial transactions. Global News reports on this announcement by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland:

The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” Freeland said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.” She said the government is also now “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades and report to the RCMP or CSIS.”

Federal institutions are also getting “new, broad authority” to share information on anyone suspected of involvement with the blockades with Canadian banks and financial institutions. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith,” Freeland said.

These are the types of powers governments have used since 9/11 to combat terrorism. It is unnerving to see them deployed against non-violent citizen protestors. The Canadian national anthem contains a prayer: "God keep our land, glorious and free." Such divine intervention might be warranted in the days to come.

THE COLUMN: 'The Whole World is Watching' *UPDATED*

In the anni horribiles of 1968-71, nearing the peak of the student protests against the Vietnam War and pretty much everything else, American streets resonated with the chant, "the whole world is watching." Watching as Chicago cops beat the college-age hippies and the yippies senseless on the streets of Chicago and arrested them en masse three years later as they gathered on the Mall in Washington. Watching as the protests metastasized and spread, taking down the Johnson administration and making the life of the Nixon administration hell.

It wasn't just in the United States, either. The year 1968 saw student unrest across Europe as well, toppling Charles De Gaulle in France by the following year and giving rise to the violent mobs of the Red Army Faction and other violent, loosely allied left-wing organizations working at the behest of the Soviet Union to destroy capitalism and undermine political stability across the Continent.

And now here we are again. Protests have broken out in both Europe and North America, led by the doughty Canadian truckers who have organized and implemented the Freedom Convoy that's currently occupying Ottawa, the capital, and was temporarily obstructing the busy Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ont., and Detroit. Their proximate cause is the immediate elimination of all the fascistic trappings of the Covid/Nanny State: the vaccines, the masks, the mandates, the travel restrictions, the whole stinking lot of them.

UPDATE: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has involved the 1988 "Emergencies Act," which allows the central government to take "special temporary measures that may not be appropriate in normal times" in order to to crack down on the protest.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday he will activate rarely used emergency powers, including cutting off financing, to end protests that have shut some border crossings and paralyzed parts of the capital. The government, saying the protests were damaging the economy and Canada's reputation as a reliable trading partner, introduced sweeping measures to support police forces and bring crowdfunding platforms under terror financing oversight.

The "Freedom Convoy" protests, started by Canadian truckers opposing a COVID-19 vaccinate-or-quarantine mandate for cross-border drivers, have drawn people opposed to Trudeau's policies on everything from pandemic restrictions to a carbon tax. "The blockades are harming our economy and endangering public safety," Trudeau told a news conference. "We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue."

"Dangerous activities" such as peaceful protest... not to mention "temporary measures" like "two weeks to flatten the curve..."

END UPDATE

This time, however, it's not Boss Daley's Chicago PD and the D.C. cops facing off against the undesirables and deplorables—it's the former undesirables themselves, now at the apogee of their political power, who are trying to throttle people they never thought they would actually have to meet in the flesh instead of the abstract: the working class.

It is, of course, a sight for sore eyes. For the political, managerial, and laptop classes who are now in command of the guys wielding the truncheons, it's the rankest sort of hypocrisy—something they once abhorred but now have learned to value. Then again, the hippies and the yippies who gathered in Grant Park in Chicago never really had any intention of joining the proletariat. Born largely into the ranks of the middle and upper-middle classes, they dodged the draft in graduate school or flat-foot-four-F'd themselves out of danger. Hell, up until the draft lottery in 1969, if you were in college you were automatically deferred from military service; after that you only had to run the ganlet once and then, if your number didn't come, you were home free.

Those were the days of the eternal graduate student, stroking his beard and muttering to himself in a corner. We thought at the time he was squandering years of his life on some useless doctoral dissertation, which would equip him for a lifetime of teaching. What we didn't realize was he was just biding his time, like a parasite in a host, just waiting for the magic year of 1972 and George McGovern's "Come Home, America" presidential campaign to come bursting onto the national political scene. Bill and Hillary Clinton, we're looking at you.

Those of us in college during those years who were not leftists never had any illusions about who these people were. From the start, they were open in their contempt for the United States, for its history and traditions, even for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When they said they believed in the first amendment, we knew they didn't mean it, that they were just using it as a shield until such time it could be discarded.

As for race, besides the war it was all they talked about, using race as a stick with which to beat the war. Noting that blacks didn't go to college in anywhere near the percentages of whites (and whites didn't much go to college in those days, either), they could loftily point out that the lads getting drafted were disproportionately black. Not that they were going to volunteer to help address the imbalance, mind you. But in any case, whites were the "freaks and monsters" of history and the world would be a better place without them. The point was to Resist, and Fight the Power:

Where did you think "wokeness" came from?

Now their pampered behinds are turning 70 and in some cases pushing 80, veterans all of the Long March through the Institutions, but their attitudes haven't changed one bit. As charter members of the largest generation in American history, they have long known they would inherit the earth, as if by divine right. And yet here, at the end, they're having to take guff from people who have no idea who Michel Foucault or Herbert Marcuse was.

And what guff! "My body, my choice." How dare they throw those words back into our faces? The most neurotic and hypochondriacal generation of all time is convinced that when they issue an "order" in the name of "public health" it is to be obeyed by lesser mortals. Why shouldn't "climate skeptics," the unvaccinated, and all the purveyors of " mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM)" be watched closely by the Man? Why, even the Department of Homeland Security, brought to you by the Bush Family of Connecticut and Texas, believes that independent thought and free speech, those hallmarks of the Sixties, now pose a danger to "our democracy"!

From the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (yes, there is such a thing):

Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation make up what CISA defines as “information activities”. When this type of content is released by foreign actors, it can be referred to as foreign influence. Definitions for each are below.

  • Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
  • Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
  • Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.

Foreign and domestic threat actors use MDM campaigns to cause chaos, confusion, and division. These malign actors are seeking to interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions and national cohesiveness.

We used to call those things mistakes or differences of opinion. All of a sudden, they're hate crimes.

Back in the day, the comic strip Pogo, by Walt Kelly, was immensely popular. Perhaps its most famous moment came on April 22, 1970—the first Earth Day—when Kelly drew a poster depicting his title character, a possum, sadly contemplating a trash-strewn landscape and observing, "We have met the enemy and he is us." The Left loved that sentiment then, and they love it now. Except that the players have switched sides.

And this time, the whole world is watching them.

THE COLUMN: Sic Semper Tyrannis

On this, the second anniversary of The-Pipeline.org, we present the first of a series of weekly columns that will appear each Monday morning. Everything on the table, nothing off the table. mw

And so we near the end of the Great Pandemic Hoax of 2019-22, an unprecedented and breathtaking power grab by governments around the world to seize powers far beyond their constitutional allotments and to transform a relatively minor flu virus — however originated and for what ill purposes — into a weapon of mass economic and emotional destruction whose effects will be felt for years and decades to come. It has been a textbook example of tyranny.

Consider it a warning shot, though, because while Covid may finally have been exposed for the non-apocalyptic event it always was, such tyranny is only the beginning until we put a stop to it. Put a stop to extra-legal "emergency" measures that are transparently and insultingly fraudulent, and which are invoked in the name of the "greater good." Put a stop to the notion of judicially sanctioned "protected classes" in a formerly classless society. Put to stop the notion of a "New Normal" of privation, deviancy, and spiritual and material penury imposed by Leftists as they continue their centuries-old task of undermining every tenet of Western Civilization in the name of "equity" — in a world in which equality is aspirational at best and equity is impossible.

And, once and for all, put paid to the notion that "when you've got your health you've got everything,"  the motto of a nation of neurotic hypochondriacs that is fundamentally at odds with every principle of the moral and socially productive life. For under this seemingly anodyne contention lies a wealth of mischief, chief among them the idea that your fellow citizens pose an existential threat to you by their refusal to conform, and thus can and should be restricted, incarcerated, or even killed as the need arises. And all in the name of Socialism, whether National or international.

Nicolae and Elena in happier times.

As we've seen via a recent study by the Johns Hopkin University (a study of studies, really), the lockdowns imposed by states, countries, and municipalities everywhere in the name of "mitigating" the spread of an illness with a 99 percent survival rate in the name of public health were completely ineffective.

Far better to have done nothing at all; instead, families were separated, the elderly (those most at risk from the respirational difficulties caused by the likely Chinese-manufactured bioweapon) died alone and often in squalor; weddings and funerals were canceled or held "virtually"; businesses were shuttered and driven into bankruptcy; more than two years of schooling were ripped away from forcibly masked children; and colleges and universities continued their descent into mere parental-money shakedown rackets by offering education-by-Zoom as they continued with their main mission of gobbling up real estate to take it off the tax rolls and fatten their endowments.

And the only people held responsible for this sanctioned crime wave were... you. You, the uncooperative, the recalcitrant, the deplorable. You, the anti-social, the rebellious, the individualists, the fighters, the darers, the doers. You, the people who founded this country in defiance of central authority and rule-by-pronunciamento, you who pledge allegiance not to a political party or a strong leader, but to a flag and to the country for which it stands. One nation, under a God whom the other side has no use for, but only contempt. Just as they do for you.

It's become axiomatic that inside every leftist is a totalitarian screaming to get out. So if there's one positive thing Covid has done is identify those people for all to see: the slave-muzzle wearers, proudly exhibiting their servile natures. They're the Karens, the mask nazis, the buttinskis who can't leave you or your family alone, the ones who screech at the sight of the unmasked like Donald Sutherland ratting out a real human being at the end of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

These are the same people who want to force you into electric cars but not provide a reliable source of electricity for them. Who wish to destroy the energy industries that built our nation, and leave you freezing or sweltering in the dark. Who condone and even encourage mass looting of shops, the murder of small Asian women waiting for a subway train, the shooting of policemen by the underclass, and the flouting of nearly every law of civilized behavior on the streets in the name of "social justice." And these are the people who, under the rubric of "climate change" and "the Great Reset," want to strip you of your home, your cars, your livelihood and, eventually, your life. No matter which office they hold, high or low or none at all, these people are your enemies and should be treated accordingly.

Make no mistake: Covid was only a beta-test, one that a submissive population passed with flying colors. Instantly repealed, without all that pesky business about amending the Constitution, were the first, fourth, fifth, and the eighth articles of the Bill of Rights. (The ninth and tenth, of course, have long since been rendered null, void, and nugatory. You remember them, the ones that reserve all unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution to the people and the states.) This is why former president Barack Obama infamously referred to our founding document as a "charter of negative liberties." Which is precisely what the Founders desired.

Read 'em and weep.

Ah, but "affirmative" rights sound so much better. Like FDR's Four Freedoms:  what could possibly go wrong with having government affirmatively promise you freedom of speech (already guaranteed by the first amendment), freedom of worship (ditto), freedom from want and freedom from fear. While they were never legislated formally, the first two were superfluous — and have in any case been repealed by Covid — and the latter two have been implemented by stealth under the false flags of "compassion" and "safety."

Affirmative rights, however, are essentially fascistic; your "safety" and material security, in the zero-sum mindsets of governments everywhere, come at the expense of someone else. Feminized guarantees of "safety" and "security" were standard fare in every European communist country until its collapse between 1989 and 1991, It's instructive to note that those are the same terms in which censorious social-media sites such as Twitter (from which I was "permanently banned" in August 2020 for unspecified "targeted harassment") and Facebook (in whose Sugarmountain Gulag I am currently spending another two weeks for "hate speech," which is Zuckerspeak for disparagement) couch their own "rules" and "community standards." The sooner both are destroyed, the better and freer everybody will be.

For when the preference cascade begins, punks, tyrants and dictators need to watch their backs as the real workers of the world unite. I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 shuttling in and out of East Germany and the Soviet Union, was in Berlin as the Wall was being torn down, and departed from Moscow just before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of '91. (The Soviet Union folded four months later.) I stood on Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest with Hungarian friends in late 1989, looking east over the Danube, as they expressed their fears of an imminent invasion from Romanian troops. Hope was in the air — the Wall had just fallen — but uncertainty still ruled. Would the useless George H.W. Bush administration come to their aid? Or, once again, would the fascist-communist tanks roll?

Instead, a miracle happened: the people, united, were not to be defeated.

On Dec. 21, 1989, the old dictator went to the well once too often, and called a rally he couldn't control. As the people's voices rose against him (if the Romanians had had trucks, they would have used them), his voice broke, his expression changed from confidence to befuddlement, the television transmission stopped, and he was whisked away. A rebellion that had started with a lone priest in the ethnically Hungarian town of Timișoara spread eastward across the country to Bucharest. The next day, the evil pair tried to escape by helicopter, but by then the army had switched sides. Ceaușescu and his wife were arrested, tried, and summarily executed.

What's the old saying?

Oh yes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Why the Left Hates Workers, Uniting

An important point from Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds, writing in the New York Post:

For more than a century, lefties have talked about [a working class] revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.

At least since Karl Marx, leftist intellectuals have valorized the working class, speaking in paternalistic terms about its plight and proposing utopian schemes to put workers on an equal footing with the well-to-do. But when they have to deal with actual workers, they're disgusted. This is because actual workers tend to be, in the words of Pat Buchanan, "conservatives of the heart" who might not "read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke" but who are patriotic and hold to the very traditional values that the Left defines itself against. Marx himself had to condemn religion as the "opiate of the masses" because "the masses" were much more interested in the faith of their fathers than his own harebrained ideology.

Reynolds is right that this familiar story is playing itself out once again in the streets of Ottawa, where truck drivers, sick and tired of Covid restrictions, have descended upon the city to demand things be set right. They've already contributed to the fall of opposition leader, Erin O'Toole, a significant feat in its own right. But they're determined to get more substantive policy changes from the party in power. So of course the government is openly contemplating sending the military after them.

Remember the freak-out when Senator Tom Cotton called on Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act during the George Floyd riots? Mass hysteria, followed quickly by the defenestration of the op-ed page editor who greenlighted the column, James Bennet (who's now in court as the defendant in a lawsuit brought by Sarah Palin over another Times editorial he oversaw). Apparently it's okay to send in the Mounties when it's a Liberal government  being protested and the entirely peaceful protestors are singing and playing hockey.

At the moment it is unclear what, if any, substantive concessions the Freedom Convoy truckers might win from the government. But their biggest success thus far has been demonstrating the contempt Canada's liberals, in government as well as the media, have for people like them.

Terry Fox, Resurrected as Victimized Canadian Icon

With the eyes of the world now on Ottawa, where an enormous truckers’ convoy is demanding an end to vaccine mandates and the resignation of the country’s hapless prime minister, Canadian print media have seized on the alleged “defacement” of the Terry Fox statue in downtown Ottawa (here and here) with the breathless outrage normally reserved for acts of extraordinary cruelty or contempt. 

The mayor of Port Coquitlam, Fox’s hometown, claimed to have been “mortified” by what happened, expressing his angry conviction that whatever message activists might have had in mind was now lost because “thousands if not millions of people in this country are going to see what they did to the Terry Fox statue and be absolutely disgusted.” 

But what exactly was done to the statue, and why should it erase the message of the Freedom Convoy?

It’s true that Terry Fox (1958-1981) was for a time the closest thing this taciturn and divided country had to a national hero, an attractive young person who responded to adversity with grit and grace. Fox was an athlete and cancer survivor who, after having had a leg amputated in 1977 due to bone cancer, set out on an east-to-west run in 1980 (the Marathon of Hope) to raise money for cancer research. When his cancer returned 143 days into his punishing marathon-a-day run, he was forced to end the campaign, but an annual event held across Canada continues to celebrate his memory and to raise millions of dollars. Although his name is not nearly as well known today as it once was, he seems an unlikely target for angry protest. One might even draw a parallel between Terry and the truckers, both crossing the country with an altruistic aim.

In recent years, damaging statues has become a common tactic by social justice activists. During the Black Lives Matter-sponsored "Summer of Love" in 2020, statues in most major cities in the United States were graffitied, toppled, beheaded, smashed, or set on fire (a partial list is found here). Statues in Toronto and other Canadian cities were also targeted for desecration. And though such acts caused outrage amongst the public, some politicians cheered on the fury of the activists while media outlets minimized the chaos and destruction they caused. 

In contrast to the swath of damage left by BLM agitators, the Terry Fox statue has not actually been harmed in any way, though one wouldn’t know it from the hand-wringing headlines. Pictures of the “defaced” statue show the figure of Fox with a cap on his head, an upside-down Canadian flag in hand (symbol of distress and danger), another flag draped like a cape from his neck, and the placard “Mandate Freedom” balanced between his chest and arm. Whether one finds the appropriation of Fox’s image to have been in good taste or not will likely depend on the intensity of one’s beliefs about vaccine mandates as an assault on individual liberty. In any case, it’s hard to see any ill will towards Terry Fox himself, or Canadian society in general, in the action. No effort at all will have been required to restore the statue to its pristine form. 

The ironies here are multiple, and the near-baseless fuss provides a snapshot of the upside-down state of cultural politics in Canada, in which a demonstration for liberty by genuinely working-class people—exactly the constituents our leaders claim to care about—can find almost no support or even a fair hearing. Terry Fox too, truth be told, was largely ignored during much of the first part of his run, especially in inward-looking Quebec, where newsmakers couldn’t be bothered about an Anglophone activist. 

Today, the legacy media has been working overtime to dig up dirt on the Freedom Convoy and to minimize the extent of its popular support. The dirt-digging has proved difficult given how well-organized and self-disciplined the truckers have shown themselves thus far. Hours of video footage have highlighted the surprising lack of rancor and good-natured diversity of this pan-Canadian uprising, with its plethora of Canadian flags, patriotic anthem-singing, and outbreaks of pickup hockey. 

Pundits could only fall back on their standard response to any expression by the working classes not authorized by the Crown Prince of Woke (and generous funder of Canadian media compliance) prime minister Justin Trudeau. Using his facile arsenal of slander, Trudeau accused the protesting truckers of racism and abuse, tweeting that they were “steal[ing] food from the homeless, “fly[ing] racist flags,” “engag[ing] in vandalism” and “dishonour[ing] the memory of our veterans.” Given that the only hard evidence for any of these claims was the so-called “vandalism” of the Terry Fox monument, that has had to be seized on with melodramatic intensity.  

Terry Fox was a beautiful young man who briefly inspired a nation notoriously reticent about heroism. But we haven’t heard much about him lately. As a heterosexual white man from a middle-class family, Fox is no longer the ideal representative of Trudea’s nation without a “core identity,” and under other circumstances, celebration of him as “iconic” would likely draw criticism from the arbiters of Canadian civic morality, who would urge us all to look elsewhere—to dark-skinned, Indigenous, and female personages—for our heroes. There are plenty of those at the Freedom Convoy, now unheralded by the media apparatus. 

It is testimony to the old adage about politics making strange bedfellows that, with their “We’re all in this together” mantra coming under threat as never before, even those who might normally disparage Terry Fox’s white male privilege are prepared to portray him as a sanctified victim.

In Canada, Between a Sponge and a Soft Place

Ottawa’s orchestrated vendetta against Canada’s energy sector, located primarily in the province of Alberta, is an instance of sublime indifference to the laws of physics, the math behind energy realities, Canadian living standards and the national welfare. It is part and parcel of the campaign to bring Canada in line with the U.N.’s anti-capitalist, globalist wealth-transfer program advantaging the Third World—in actual fact, benefiting only the ruling class of these nations.

And it is, of course, a scheme for enriching investors and "green" industrialists for whom the Green Technology adventure has become a government-fed cash cow, abetted by public gullibility and self-righteousness. Conservative Alberta is now at risk of bankruptcy. 

(Wikipedia).

Canada’s great conservative thinker, George Grant, wrote in Lament for a Nation that "Canada was predicated on the rights of nations as well as on the rights of individuals.” He might also have written “the rights of provinces.” The book’s subtitle, The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, bespeaks Grant’s abiding fear that the country had forgotten its conservative origin in communal solidarity and had sold its future to a managerial elite wedded to the notion of unmitigated “progress.”

A devout traditionalist, Grant was skeptical of unrestrained capital markets and of what he called, in Technology & Justice, “technological ontology.” Liberals—and some Conservatives—consider him out of touch with modernity, a throwback to a pre-modern age. But his emphasis on individual responsibility and commitment to the values of truth and justice remain the core of conservative thinking. In the “Afterword” to Lament, his widow recalls one of Grant’s “simplest statements: ‘It always matters what each of us does.’”

Modern Canadian conservatism owes much to Alberta-born Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party, which was succeeded by the Canadian Alliance and ultimately by the Conservative Party of Canada. As articulated in his The New Canada, Manning believed in fiscal prudence, the need to control the deficit and to live within our means, in doing away with redistributive economics and progressive taxation and relying instead on market forces and job creation. He believed in the reduction of federal power and in the provincial management of political and economic responsibilities. For advocating such ideas, Manning said, “We were called everything under the sun, from fascists to traitors to racists.” How such a sensible and mature platform can be condemned as “far right,” extremist, or as some sort of nascent fascism boggles the mind. 

Preston Manning (Wikipedia).

Manning understands energy and its crucial importance to priming the engine of prosperity, facilitating job creation and strengthening the Canadian economy across the board. He urges provincial cooperation to “put enormous pressure on the Federal government to get pipeline rights of way to both the Pacific and the Atlantic.” In his new book Do Something!: 365 Ways You Can Strengthen Canada Manning writes: “[W]e need unobstructed transportation corridors to the Atlantic, Pacific and the Arctic to move our resources to tidewater and world markets. We need a federal government that’s supportive of these kinds of measures rather than one that obstructs.”

Manning is also deeply concerned about the corrosive prospect of growing Western alienation. “The problems with the energy sector,” which he lays at Ottawa’s door, “and the inability to get resources to tidewater and world markets are all fueling Western alienation.” He is right. Wexit is picking up momentum and Wexit Canada is now an official political party.

Former Conservative PM Stephen Harper (aka “Harperman,” as the socialist rabble and environmental scientist Tony Turner maligned him) was often tarred as “far right” for his fiscal prudence (which steered us through the 2008 financial meltdown) when, to be accurate, he was a “conservative centrist” some of whose policies—maintaining high immigration rates from Muslim countries, or refusing to re-open the abortion debate—consorted with Liberal positions. Some have criticized him, too, as being somewhat ambivalent on the oil patch, neglecting to build a sufficient pipeline distribution network. Harper did not govern as effectively as he could have, but as a trained economist he understood the industry that contributed massively to the country’s prosperity.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is leading Canada to an Argentinian-type default and economic collapse, setting his sights on net-zero in more ways than one, is no friend of George Grant, Preston Manning or Stephen Harper; he is much closer to his father’s socialist influence Harold Laski, who was Pierre Trudeau’s mentor at the London School of Economics. Laski held that capitalism inevitably led to internal contradictions, economic crashes and depressions, and proposed the socialist control of natural resources and property to be shared by all of society’s stakeholders.

Harold Laski (1893 - 1950), circa 1940.

The predictable irony, of course, endemic to all socialist regimes, is the splintering of society into warring interest groups, the eventual imposition of top-down single party rule, and the disintegration of a common culture once based on historical precedent and loyalty to one’s neighbor. As we see in the Western world today—Canada is no exception—the sense of unity has been replaced by entitlement categories like ethnicity, race, gender, creed, class and selective political persuasion.

Indeed, in opposition to Grant’s sense of national unity, which inspired both Manning and Harper, Trudeau has stated that Canada is a “post-national state” that has no “core identity.” A country that has no core identity is not a country preoccupied with issues of national unity and the economic foundation on which it rests. Trudeau is not interested in the oil patch but in the national patchwork. He is an outright socialist—perhaps Marxist is a better term—and an aspiring globalist who lusts for a seat in the United Nations’ bloated hierarchy. 

Notwithstanding his sentimental effusions about the country he leads, Trudeau is, to put it bluntly, anti-Canadian, and his animus against the energy sector and the economic stability it provides is par for the course. Like a good Marxist, he is busy steering the nation into monumental debt and abject penury. Tex Leugner, one of the lay leaders of the Wexit movement and editor of the ActionAlberta newsletter, is very clear on this. “Each day,” he writes, “Canada loses between $80 and $100 million because of the failure of our Federal Government to allow pipelines to be built. At this rate, over the next 12 months that amount could balloon to as much as $36.5 billion lost to the Canadian economy! As this money is lost, our Federal debt continues to increase.” And that’s only for starters. Statistics Canada reveals that the “poverty gap” under Trudeau has grown—in figures for 2018, two years before he had a chance to do even more damage. 

The question now, following the election of the waffly Erin O’Toole to the Conservative Party leadership, is whether the Conservatives can be counted on to pursue a sane, nation-restoring agenda. O’Toole is committed to net-zero emission by 2050; if he ran an online journal, it might be called The Pipedream. Indeed, he has just signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement in a doomed attempt to out-Trudeau Trudeau. Considering that there is no hard scientific evidence that the globe is warming, that the U.S. as major signatory has pulled out of the Accord, and that, in any case, China and India, the world’s largest polluters, have no intention of reducing emissions, the Agreement is not worth the paper it is written on, though it will cost its adherents dearly. O’Toole is merely virtue-signaling for electoral purposes. 

The only leadership candidate reliably true to the tradition of Grant and Manning was Derek Sloan, who may find himself cast into outer darkness for, among other things, voicing justifiable suspicion of Canada’s chief health minister Theresa Tam’s loyalties. Hong Kong-born Tam was all over the map in her COVID recommendations, hewing closely to the China-inspired line of the World Health Organization while sitting on one of its prestigious boards.  

Justin & son.

The fact that she happens to be Chinese was (and is) irrelevant, but it was enough to generate accusations of racism from the Asian community and from Conservative MPs Gordon Chong and Pam Demoff. “[T]he Conservative Party that I know does not stand for this kind of garbage,” Chong blustered. Demoff for her part accused Sloan of “racism, misogyny, and bigotry.” The attempt to “cancel” Sloan and destroy his political career is evidence, once again, of how easily people can be duped into taking offence at reasonable skepticism—or how cynical they can be in trying to score political points. I have indicated in a previous article for The Pipeline that Tam’s behavior was highly dubious, lying about the mode of viral transmission and even removing vital information from airport message screens regarding flights from China into the country. O’Toole has not come to the defense of Sloan and is cannily playing the popularity game, which seems to make him, at best, a Diet Conservative. 

Clearly, the Conservative Party has some trouble aligning itself with true-blue conservatism represented by a genuinely conservative politician like Sloan, an upholder of traditional usages and institutions, a stringent anti-socialist, a Canadian patriot, and a vigorous supporter of the energy industry. Alberta is where the country’s energy resides. Sloan is where the Party’s energy lies. It is by no means surprising that both have come under the shadow of repudiation. 

Erin O'Toole (left).

There can be no doubt that a mushy O’Toole would make a better Prime Minister than a spongy Trudeau, but this does not change the fact that Canada’s two major energy fields have been suffering catastrophically and, barring a miracle, will likely continue to do so. One field is obviously the oil/gas/pipeline sector, which is in process of being phased out. The other is Canada’s political energy zone, presumably a national endowment, which has been going increasingly woke. With these two sources of revivifying energy—generated power and political intelligence-and-integrity—seemingly moribund, Canada would have little future to speak of.

Conservative Energy, or Canada at the Crossroads

Now that scandal-prone Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approval rating has taken something of a hit, placing the Conservatives at least potentially within striking distance of forming the next government, the question that confronts Canada is whether a Conservative administration could honestly face the shambles that the Liberal government has made of Canada’s most important resource industry, energy production. Would it rescue the energy sector, located primarily in the province of Alberta, from its dormant condition and, at the same time, render unnecessary the budding secessionist, or Wexit, movement in a justifiably resentful Alberta, thus saving Confederation? 

The platform of the newly-elected leader of the Party, Erin O’Toole, seems at first blush encouraging for the energy sector and Alberta’s future prospects, but O’Toole is a noted flip-flopper—not particularly good news for either energy or Alberta. As John O’Sullivan writes in The Pipeline:

O'Toole has been all over the place on the resource sector, initially calling for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies…before backing away from that pledge.

How O’Toole can claim in his platform that “Climate Change is a global problem, that requires a global solution,” while at the same time stating that “Domestic energy production – including oil and gas – is an important part of making our country more self-reliant and more resilient in future” remains a conundrum. Which is noise and which is information? In other respects, his platform seems promising, but the jury will be out for some time. 

A pumpjack in a canola field keeps the lights on.

Leslyn Lewis, whose strong finish in the leadership sweepstakes may earn her a shadow cabinet position, has a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from York University in Toronto—one of the country’s notoriously woke institutions with little professional stature—where actual climate science yields to a highfalutin iteration of cultural studies. It is, according to its mission statement, “a community that respects and values insight, creativity, justice, and diversity,” but leaves real science at a discount. Although lauded for her environmental expertise, Lewis, as a graduate of Environmental Studies, is a mere dilettante in the field. She has taken many principled social and political stands, but regrettably understands neither energy nor economics.

With the exception of failed leadership candidate Derek Sloan, who is pro-life, a believer in family and parental rights, emphatically anti-socialist, and a muscular supporter of the energy industry—and who is in danger of being expelled from the Caucus on the ludicrous grounds of  “racism, misogyny, and bigotry”—the Conservative Party as a whole, to this point in time, has been more or less devoid of positive initiatives.

Indeed, it appears to have forgotten its founding principles, as adumbrated by Canada’s great conservative thinker George Grant in Lament for a Nation: love of country, the rule of law, civil responsibility, an enduring moral order, freedom of speech, economic prudence, and restraint upon the sweeping exercise of government authority. Unfortunately, conservatism and the Conservative Party in its current incarnation do not always speak the same language. Whether O'Toole represents an answer to the Party’s dilemma remains to be seen.  

Erin, go bragh.

Meanwhile, Alberta is still holding the short end of the stick. It is for the first time in living memory a have-not province. After sending $630 billion in transfer payments to Quebec and the other provinces since 1961, it has received a federal transfer supplement (or so-called equalization payment) of $22 billion for 2020, misnamed as a “net gain.” This is total nonsense.

To begin with, in the current economic context $22 billion is a mere sop; moreover, the supplement is borrowed money that will have to be repaid with interest as part of the $350 billion Canada is borrowing for this year.

Ottawa is not re-distributing domestic wealth to disadvantaged provinces, as envisioned in the national Equalization Formula, but transferring borrowed wealth. Things need to be called by their proper names. Alberta’s $22 billion does not qualify as a “net gain” but a net liability. Wexit does seem to be the only hope for Alberta, whether as a bargaining chip or a realized outcome, but the trouble is that there are too many Canadians and not enough Albertans in the province. 

A sane reclamation of the energy sector will be a difficult slog—not least because an acceptable conservative in leftist Canada, as geologist John Weissenberger writes in The Laurentian ‘Elite’: Canada’s Ruling Class, is “one who can be counted on to lose gracefully”—but Canada will reap the whirlwind in scuppering the energy industry and bankrupting Alberta in the process. Energy is gold and it resides mainly in Canada’s west. 

It will take a surge of conservative energy to restore the country to its former viability. If Erin O’Toole remains true to his commitment to revive domestic energy production, without equivocation, the future may not be entirely dismal. Perhaps we will see a strong pushback by patriotic organizations intent on restoring the energy sector. The threat of Wexit may help to awaken a sleepy Canadian electorate, who may also be galvanized by mounting unemployment, rocketing prices, extortionate taxes, social anarchy and a failing power grid. But by then it may well be too late.