Canada failed this week.
Although the country is supposedly a “liberal democracy,” supreme leader Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s emergency act to inaugurate a police state in order to clear out the trucker protest from the nation’s capital of Ottawa. There, the truckers had enjoyed barbecues, music, and bouncy houses for kids while calling for an end to mandates forcing Canadians to take a vaccine that is proving to be deadly.
The Trudeau regime — for it truly is a regime in the sense that it is now presided over by an unaccountable strongman — literally sent the cavalry into the crowd to stamp out the protest on Friday, February 18. Cellphone video captured the moment Canadian storm troopers mounted on horseback pushed into the crowd of innocent citizens, literally trampling them into the ground. A horrifying screen grab from a video appears to show one of the horses stepping on the back of woman lying on the ground. It is highly unlikely she escaped the incident without serious injury.
Canadian journalist Joe Warmington noted the photo of this horrible crime in a column for the Toronto Sun. “Turns out the lasting image of the Freedom Convoy protest at Parliament Hill will not be bouncy castles but that of a woman with a walker being trampled by a police horse,” he wrote.
This was a despicable crime — and not the only one — conducted by officers acting on behalf of a government that has decided it is no longer to be restrained by law. Under the law, the use of the Emergencies Act must be approved by Parliament after it is implemented by the prime minister. Canada no longer is governed by Parliament, however, but instead is a one-man dictatorship — and that one man was “enjoying” the Olympics being held in Communist China while his storm troopers were beating innocent Canadians in the streets, as Warmington noted on Twitter.
“Martial law, no media allowed to cover it, debate on unnecessary Emergencies Act suspended, bank accounts seized and Justin is watching the Olympics,” the outraged journalist wrote.
Keep in mind, there was no violence at any time during the weeks-long protest in Ottawa. Canadians worried that their rights were being violated by government mandates — the mandates being themselves a crime against human rights — simply sought through peaceful demonstration to reclaim their right to be secure against forced medication. The only violence occurred when Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers busted into the crowd, trampling them with horses and beating them with rifle butts.
How could this have happened in Canada, of all places? One answer is that that Canada does not have a Bill of Rights. Instead, Canadians have their “Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Sure, that document purports to offer “guarantees” of “the rights and freedoms” it outlines as belonging to Canadians, but it does so with the important proviso that those rights and freedoms are subject to “reasonable limits prescribed by law.”
If rights and freedoms can be restricted by “reasonable limits prescribed by law,” then, ultimately, those rights and freedoms don’t actually exist — they are mere privileges to be revoked at the whim of whoever runs the government.
Contrast this with the U.S. Bill of Rights. The First Amendment, for example, reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment doesn’t say “Congress shall make no law except…” Instead, it just states plainly that “Congress shall make no law….” In the United States, the federal government is legally barred from interfering with the exercise of religion, free speech, and assembly, among other things. This is simply not true in Canada.
And so Canada, like most places around the world, has always had the foundation of dictatorship embedded within its system of government, even if the people there have been unaware of it. Certainly, after the events of February 18, most Canadians should be aware of the danger they face.
But citizens of the United States should feel neither smug nor secure within the borders of their great Republic, for lurking within the seat of power in Washington, D.C., lies a heart of darkness, concentrated in the liberal-progressive Deep State and gnawing ceaselessly like a gravitational singularity within the breast of the antique warmonger Joe Biden.
Biden and his handlers and enablers almost certainly look north with glee, admiration, and envy. They would like nothing more than to see the Constitution that restrains their own desires for ultimate and unaccountable power burned to the ground and its ashes consigned to the dustbin of history so that they can rule from Washington as Trudeau does from Ottawa.
Indeed, on February 3, Biden himself made the claim of the Bill of Rights that “there’s no amendment that’s absolute.” Certainly he wishes that were true, but, fortunately for Americans, it is not — the U.S. is not Canada.
But it could easily enough become Canada. There are innumerable threats to the Constitution and its all-important Bill of Rights. These include threats not only from the totalitarian Left represented by Biden, but also from some people claiming to be conservatives and libertarians. From that side come activism calling for a new constitutional convention, editorial rumblings that states should consider secession, and even deluded nonsense about the possibility of some future civil war. This latter is to be condemned in the strongest terms as unacceptable, but any threats to the Constitution need to be opposed with all possible vigor.
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights must be respected, honored, revered, and — most importantly — protected, because if it fails and is lost, then so too is freedom lost. And if freedom is lost in the United States of America, then the prospect of freedom anywhere in the world evaporates as little more than a wisp of smoke above an extinguished bonfire.
As American citizens, then, let us pray for our neighbors to the north that this moment of apparent triumph for the partisans of dark, dictatorial rule actually instead lights anew a bright flame of longing for liberty that results in a new flowering of freedom across the north.
In the meantime, let’s renew our vigorous support for our Constitution and Bill of Rights here in our own great Republic.
