The Big Story
While much of the world is focused on the conflict in Ukraine, The Scroll is publishing a special edition today devoted entirely to the showdown in Canada. We believe that the coordinated effort by the Canadian government and the financial establishment to target protestors is the most significant event in the world right now for the citizens of Western democracies who have been mostly quiescent through two years of having their accustomed freedoms abridged in the name of a COVID-19 emergency.
If recent events are a fair indicator, the willingness of Canadians and Americans to follow ever-changing COVID-19 rules may be at an end. And in both the United States and Canada, we are seeing governments use frameworks built during the global war on terror to prosecute citizens with unsanctioned political beliefs.
The weeks-long trucker protests in Canada against COVID-19 vaccine mandates have demonstrated how a small opposition group can leverage control over critical resources and online network effects to disrupt an advanced society. No doubt the protests were a nuisance to many ordinary Canadians, but they were also—contrary to the claims made in press reports that focused on a handful of people carrying Confederate flags—a peaceful movement led by working-class truckers whose livelihoods have been jeopardized by the COVID-19 policies they assembled to protest. Precisely because the protests were effective and challenged the mandates of Canada’s ruling party, they triggered an unprecedented reaction from the government. By invoking the never-before-used 1988 Emergencies Act—a statute that was intended exclusively to address threats of existential violence—Canada’s ruling party has tested new methods of population control that involve subcontracting the duties of government to private corporations operating outside the scrutiny and strictures of the law.
According to Canadian constitutional scholar Ryan Alford, the full, radical implications of the Emergencies Act are still being worked out. While the Emergencies Act clearly authorizes the government to punish thousands of Canadian citizens who donated money to the Freedom Convoy by ordering their financial institutions to freeze their accounts, it’s not yet known whether that would also apply to individuals who donate to causes related to protesting the Emergencies Act itself. “If you were to go to Parliament Hill right now with a sign that says, ‘Revoke the Emergencies Act,’ you would be subject to being arrested, charged, and imprisoned under the Emergencies Act for the act of protesting. The fact that what you’re protesting is the Emergencies Act itself is immaterial,” Alford told The Scroll. “We don’t know if that same rationale would be invoked with respect to financial support, but we very much need to know.”
It is no surprise that U.S. officials have backed their Canadian counterparts, with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg encouraging Canadian authorities to crack down on protestors. The new playbook in Canada—with private corporations disenfranchising citizens at the behest of government officials and ideological activists—has been active in the United States since the rise of Donald Trump. The Biden administration has declared domestic extremism a top priority of the national security establishment while stretching the definition of that label to include ordinary Trump supporters and others whose views are deemed to contribute to “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but it’s here, happening now.
In The Back Pages: Canadian Constitutional Scholar Ryan Alford on the Permanent Emergency
The Rest
→ Members of the People’s Convoy, a movement organized by truckers to protest COVID-19 restrictions, will begin arriving in Washington, D.C., today, and the National Guard has been called up to meet them. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the request from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Capitol Police for additional support, mobilizing as many as 400 unarmed troops to “provide support at designated traffic posts, provide command and control, and cover sustainment requirements.” The protestors, inspired by the Freedom Convoy in Canada, say they are coming in peace but that they plan to occupy crucial roads and highways, such as the D.C. Beltway. “We’re going to have a shutdown,” one organizer said. The Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa, Canada’s capital, was forcibly cleared over the weekend, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau enacted emergency measures to suppress the protests.
→ Tamara Lich, a Freedom Convoy organizer who was arrested last week on a charge of “counseling to commit mischief,” has been denied bail. A judge on the Ontario Superior Court said Lich had been “almost obstructive” in her testimony and would likely continue counseling others to commit mischief. A “mischief” charge is broadly defined and can be used to arrest protestors who interfere with someone else’s rights or property; “counseling to commit mischief” would be encouraging someone else to commit such crimes. Lich, who has had her financial accounts frozen, now faces the possibility of jail time. Nearly 200 protestors have been arrested since the beginning of the Ottawa occupation.
→ Strategic analyst John Robb describes the template for how political repression is coordinated around the law in digital-era democracies.
→ Tweets sent out by the CEOs of Coinbase and Kraken, two prominent cryptocurrency banks and exchange sites, were flagged by the Ontario Securities Commission, who passed the tweets along to Canadian law enforcement for review. The CEOs tweeted advice to Freedom Convoy protestors on how to evade the emergency restrictions put in place by the Canadian government. The Emergencies Act allowed Trudeau’s government to freeze the assets of protestors and their financial supporters. The Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mountain Police called upon all financial institutions, including the crypto exchanges, to freeze the accounts of “designated persons” who were connected to the protests. The tweets from the two CEOs suggested that protestors hold their cryptocurrency in digital wallets, a technology that securely stores funds out of the reach of all third parties, including the government. Both Coinbase and Kraken will comply with the government’s orders to freeze accounts.
→ Much the same as their compatriots in the United States, most normal Canadians have lost trust in the media.
→ “Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.” —David Sacks writing in Bari Weiss’ Substack, Common Sense, on how “A Social Credit System Arrives in Canada.”
Read more:
The following is a lightly edited version of an interview Tuesday over Zoom with Canadian constitutional scholar Ryan Alford, the author of a 2017 book titled Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law.
Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Monday. What’s changed since then?
What has changed so far is that we’ve seen a lot of comments on the government about how they’re backing off on the use of the most controversial powers. There have been a number of statements about how they are no longer freezing bank accounts and financial products and are going to start unfreezing them. The problem is that they’ve continually asserted—particularly within the House of Commons finance committee—that they have the power to do this. Essentially, they’re exercising their discretion not to continue with this incredibly bold course of action of initiating seizures without any due process, without any judicial oversight. But they’re preserving the right to do it—and that’s perhaps the most disturbing element of this.
And the banks are indemnified, right? They can’t be held legally liable for any of this.
Right. The government presents them with a very vague, open-ended regulation. It states that they have this responsibility to do these things, and then says, “Oh, and by the way, if you get this wrong and you ruin someone’s life—they default on their mortgage, et cetera—you have no liability.” It almost looks as if there’s a clear signal that they want the banks to be aggressive, but then the government can disclaim the responsibility for having done that.
I haven’t seen any indication of resistance from banking institutions. Has there been any friction in the implementation of this?
None whatsoever, and you shouldn’t expect any from an entity that owes existence to the government and is so carefully regulated by the government. Granting a banking charter is essentially a license to print money. As long as you meet these regulatory requirements, which can be quite complex, you can borrow money and then loan it out at interest. You have agencies controlled by the executive of the government charged with overseeing the regulations that can either say, “That’s a very minor fine for you, carry on as normal,” or they could revoke the charter of a bank.
How has the Emergencies Act influenced the physical clearing of the protests by law enforcement?
It was the precise opposite of the financial actions, and it shows you how useful the emergency powers are in either direction. What happened there was the federal government essentially assumed direct control over policing. They pushed out the police chief of Ottawa, who had been on record for many years saying that the style of policing that he would encourage in this sort of event would be de-escalation. They pushed him out, and the executive took over direct control of how policing was run in Ottawa. And they used this to do things that couldn’t otherwise be done. For instance, a mass contingent of riot police drawn from Quebec, provincial police, were brought in, and they clearly covered their badge numbers and their names so they couldn’t be identified for the purpose of use-of-force complaints.
What will this mean for future mass protests in Canada? What will be different the next time?
What we know for sure is that the nature of the policing will be contingent on the political message being spread by the protestors. We don’t know, depending on which ideological faction is backing the next set of protests, whether the prime minister will breach health regulations, which were deemed previously to be of the highest importance, to go down and participate in the demonstration, shake hands with people, hug people, kneel [Editor’s note: Alford is making an apparent reference to Trudeau’s decision to participate in Black Lives Matter demonstrations during the initial novel-coronavirus wave in 2020, after he had advised the public to practice social distancing], or he’ll send in riot police. This is just battery acid on public esteem for the rule of law. That’s the real damage.
To claim that a vaccine mandate is "the most significant event in the world right now for the citizens of Western democracies" makes as much sense as making the same claim about passage of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act when Germany was preparing to invade Poland.
I guess it's working: The Orwellian scenario the was able to blossom like a poisonous plant in the pumped-upfears concerning Covid are now home to roost in our population's compliance with any "mandate" that's handed to us. Canada and Trudeau, the U.S. and all its spurious "leaders." Where is Patrick Henry now when we need a revolution of awareness and taking back our power?