Imagine a Trumpdeau. You Can’t

T o bring an end to the Freedom Convoy led by Canada’s truckers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now exercising extraordinary powers under the nation’s Emergencies Act. The act was designed to empower a government to protect Canada from threats to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. But Trudeau is using it to get rid of a political headache: the loud, noisome, but nonviolent blockade of bridges in Canada and the downtown of the nation’s capital.

Canada’s Emergencies Act is an enabling act that replaced the War Measures Act. This state of legal exception has been invoked only during the two world wars and during Canada’s struggle against the FLQ, when a violent organization of Quebecois nationalists kidnapped the deputy premiere of Quebec. Now it’s being used on the trucker convoy, which has been notably nonviolent despite serious provocation, such as the government’s simply sabotaging privately owned heavy equipment, or the court-ordered freeze of donations.

Under the Emergencies Act, the government of Canada is encouraging banks to suspend the accounts of people participating in or assisting the protest in any way, suspending a bank’s usual need for a court order. This encouragement includes a guarantee of legal immunity against civil action that would be filed in court. The government will also share its intelligence info with banks — in other words, direct them to the accounts they want suspended. The government will broaden its law against funding terrorism to go after crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and GiveSendGo, essentially demanding user data to go after those supporting the protest.

And of course, seeing this, one cannot help but think: Imagine if Trump had done this during the riots of 2020.

Now, the easy thing here would be to note the simple hypocrisies. One immediately thinks of the mainstream-media outlets that have given Trudeau fair or positive coverage in taking these steps, and have villainized the protesters. Had Trump taken such a momentous step to suspend certain constitutional liberties, they would have labeled it the dawn of fascism and the moment to resist with every might available. All the protesters and rioters would be hallowed.

That’s all true, but it misses the more important point. Which is that if Trump had taken such a step, the banks would not have complied. Hardly any private institutions would have complied. They would have calculated correctly, and put their faith in the permanent members of the executive branch, who would refuse to comply, or openly undermine the president’s commands, whims, and wishes — as the Pentagon often did during Trump’s term. They would have faith in the judiciary, that it too would meet this novel challenge with novelties of its own.

Right now, the people who donated to the truckers via GiveSendGo, a platform built by conservative Christians to do crowdfunding that could not be canceled, are having their names and data leaked all over the Internet so that CBC, the Canadian public broadcaster, and private citizens can harass them, and presumably strip them of their livelihoods — a repeat of the witch hunt that happened after Proposition 8 in California.

Where was this urgency to disrupt and end the scores of church burnings across Canada last year? It was nowhere. Prime Minister Trudeau called the arsons “fully understandable.” The supposed justification for these rages — supposed mass graves at Catholic schools — could not be found or substantiated upon investigation.

The message to conservatives and Christians is quite clear: Don’t piss us off or else. And don’t call for help; we’re not coming.

The law and the state are anxious to stamp out the truckers and anyone sympathetic to them. But it is the progressive domination of other, nominally private, institutions that gives progressive governments in the West such bite and license. These include the major corporate firms. It includes the enormous tax-exempt hedge funds that fund a phalanx of progressive administrators. You know, the ones that have smaller vestigial universities attached to them, such as Harvard and Yale. It includes the majority of the government-funded NGO sectors here and abroad, which transmit with the same messages as the permanent government sees fit. All these power centers magnify the power of progressives in government and largely cancel the power of conservatives in office.

Hypocrisy isn’t our problem. Our problem is that progressives, through the habits and mores of the upper middle class, are vertically integrating the institutions of what used to be “civil society” for their political agenda. There used to be a certain F-word for that, but if you say it, you’re going to make it onto their lists.