Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic . . . Trudeau’s Response To Canadian Truckers And The Implications For Civil Liberties

By STEPHEN M. KRASON

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response to the recent truckers’ protest had the ring of authoritarianism. Although firm governmental action in response to the truck blockades at crossing points into the U.S. may have been justified — actually, these mostly ended peacefully with the truckers agreeing to pull back — the action against the truckers’ protest in the capital of Ottawa pursuant to Trudeau’s invoking the Emergencies Act was excessive. Some actions of the police — carried out after a new Ottawa police chief ready to do Trudeau’s bidding was installed — bordered on brutality.
The Emergencies Act was enacted to deal with wartime dangers or violent rebellion, not a peaceful protest like this one. It was doubtful even that movement through Ottawa was seriously disrupted because the truckers left a lane open for other traffic.
The truckers’ protest occurred because of Trudeau’s unreasonable and oppressive policies to deal with the coronavirus situation, which included forcing the truckers to take the vaccine — which time will show may not be safe — in order to cross the border into the U.S. and tracking their movements. Trudeau dug in his heels from the start. He refused to meet with the truckers or to engage them in dialogue about their concerns.
He denounced them as a fringe group and claimed, without any explanation or evidence, that they were racists and anti-woman (this was despite the fact that it was a female political activist from western Canada who was one of the main organizers of the protest). He even intimated that they were terrorists. He claimed that the protest was harming Canada’s economy — even though he provided no evidence to back that up, and his intransigence may have contributed to that alleged harm — and that it was endangering public safety — even though it was noticeably devoid of violence.
Support of Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergencies Act ended up dividing on partisan lines, with his Liberal Party voting to support it in the Canadian House of Commons and the Conservative Party opposing.
With the invoking of the Emergencies Act, the Ottawa police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who were brought in began to break up the demonstration. They substantially outnumbered the protesters, and it was with them that the violence occurred. They towed trucks away, sometimes smashing their windows and damaging them in other ways. They pepper-sprayed the protesters, clubbed some with sticks (even though the protesters were not armed), and arrested nearly two hundred of them on the vague charge of “mischief.” One woman was trampled by an RCMP officer’s horse. The woman co-organizer of the protest was initially held in jail without bail. The government froze the protesters’ bank accounts and it threatened to do the same to anyone who donated money to them. The government also threatened to cancel the truckers’ vehicle insurance policies and revoke their drivers’ licenses.
All this would be done without due process. One of the crowdfunding Internet sites that was raising money for the protesters (GiveSendGo) was hacked into and anyone who then went to it was diverted to another site that claimed that contributions were funding an insurrection. The hacker also leaked to the public the names and addresses of donors, exposing them to possible threats from pro-government elements.
While it is not clear that the Trudeau government was responsible for the hack, an ally of the government certainly was and this followed Trudeau’s request that millions in donations previously made to the truckers through the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform be diverted — without the contributors’ permission — to other causes (as one source put it, this was stealing people’s donations). These violations of citizen rights followed the initial assault on civil liberty by violating the right of people to control their own bodies and make decisions about their health with the vaccine mandate itself (which, to boot, for a disease that was for most people hardly severe).
The Canadian government was doing all of this not because the truckers were a genuine threat to the country, but because they were peacefully protesting — in other words, speaking up against a decision of the government. True, maybe there was some disruption — the horn-honking of some of the truckers was a problem — but the streets were not made inaccessible by the truckers and they were certainly not blocking or assaulting people who wanted to drive or walk by them.
Especially troubling in all this was the Trudeau government’s unwillingness to bend even a bit, to concede that their policy could even be modified somewhat. As mentioned, they would not even dialogue with the truckers. The government was insisting on its position, and ultimately used force against people who peaceably spoke and organized against it and then arrested them even though they had not violated what, in any true sense, could be called a law (“mischief”).
Some of this also involved what could only be called a stretching of the law to put the clamps as hard as possible on the protesters, as with freezing their bank accounts without any clear legal authorization and providing no legal recourse. That’s in addition to the central fact that the whole episode in any reasonable sense could not truly be called a national emergency so as to justify the Trudeau government’s response. This suggested arbitrariness and the undercutting of the rule of law.
This all was happening in what is supposed to be a representative government, which at bottom line claims the people are the sovereign. How can this be said not to smack of authoritarianism? One wonders if a tilt in that direction is entirely surprising for Trudeau, who — along with his late father, the earlier Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau — was known for praising the Cuban Communist despot Fidel Castro.

Unwilling To Criticize Trudeau

What are the implications of the Canadian government’s actions for the U.S.? Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, just as the U.S. has a Bill of Rights. It should be noted, however, that even though there is a tradition of individual liberties in Canada, it did not enshrine them into a fundamental national document until 1960 when the Canadian Bill of Rights was put into effect, to be succeeded by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That could suggest that individual rights under law are more deeply grounded in American history than in Canadian, which could mean that Canadian leaders may feel a greater freedom to address situations in ways that are less respectful of rights. Also, American courts have had a long history of intervening to protect citizen liberties and the U.S. has also probably had much a longer experience with street protests. So, it would seem that the invocation of something like martial law in the U.S. is not as likely.
Still, it is disturbing that Biden and other Western leaders were unwilling to criticize Trudeau for what he did. It is said that Biden even urged Trudeau to crack down on the protesters. Their readiness in many cases to impose very restrictive measures — which bordered on being repressive — due to the coronavirus is also not an encouraging development. These have included, in countries like Austria, even mandatory vaccination just as with the Canadian truckers. These policies have perhaps set a precedent that will make it easier for Western leaders to suppress liberties in the future in increasingly less serious situations (and the coronavirus seems not to have been such an urgent situation itself).
One can add to this the political reality that left-of-center parties like the Democrats, who for so long touted their support for civil liberties, seem to have become more prepared to ignore them even while aggressively pushing ersatz liberties like abortion, sodomy, and same-sex “marriage.” One wonders if the Canadian episode is a harbinger of enhanced political repression throughout the West.

• + + (Stephen M. Krason is professor of political science and legal studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville, associate director of the University’s Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life, and co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. His books include The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic; Catholicism and American Political Ideologies: Catholic Social Teaching, Liberalism, and Conservatism; and a Catholic political novel, American Cincinnatus.)