Canada tramples on free speech

 

     By Reginald Johnson

        Commentary

   A stanza in the Canadian national anthem, ‘O, Canada’ goes like this:

‘From far and wide,

 ‘O, Canada! we stand on guard for thee!’

 ‘God keep our land glorious and free!’

‘O, Canada, we stand on guard for thee!’

  Unfortunately, based on events of the last few weeks, the word ‘free’ in that song may not apply anymore. And ‘glorious’ may not apply either.

 The Canadian government disgraced itself in brutally cracking down on a group of truckers, known as the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ who were protesting long-running vaccine mandates. The government acted more like a dictatorship run by Augusto Pinochet rather than a democracy that accommodates the expression of different points of view.

 Driving in from different parts of the country, the truckers had taken their rigs into Ottawa, the capital of Canada, blocked streets and blared their horns. Some other truckers for a time blocked the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan.

   No question, these protests were annoying and clearly interrupted daily life and regular business in Canada. But there was no significant violence during this period --- nobody burned down buildings, nobody robbed stores and nobody assaulted police.  As with any large protest group, some people behaved poorly and authorities made some arrests for alleged hate crimes, though few specifics have emerged.

  By and large, the demonstrators were peaceful and respectful. By blocking roads and bridges, the truckers were engaged in civil disobedience, a cherished tradition in democracies.

   But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau laced into the truckers, calling them hateful and violent. Instead of meeting with the group and trying to understand their grievances, Trudeau and local officials ordered the police to break up the protest, and break it up they did --- violently.

  Swinging batons, the police smashed the windows on trucks where truckers were refusing to leave. Another protester was thrown on the ground, and a video showed an officer kneeing the person repeatedly. Police rode horses into a crowd of people and a woman singing “Peace, Love and Freedom” was knocked to the ground and trampled.

   But the worst aspect of the government’s crackdown on the truckers was the move to essentially freeze their bank accounts. Trudeau, invoking Canada’s never-used “Emergencies Act,” had his government order a freeze on millions of dollars raised on social media accounts.

  This was an incredible attack on people’s rights of free speech and the right to protest. It has a fascistic ring to it --- a government attacking peoples’ finances simply because they don’t like their views or their acts of civil disobedience.

Parliament building, Ottawa, Canada. The government of Canada recently ordered a brutal crackdown on truckers protesting vaccine mandates, denying them free speech rights. 

 The Supreme Court of Canada approved the bank freeze in what Georgetown University Professor of Law Jonathan Turley called “a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada.”

  The Canadian Civil Liberties Association criticized Trudeau, saying the government’s use of emergency powers infringes on the basic rights of the truckers guaranteed to Canadians under the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International also criticized the Canadian government for its actions.

  It has been disturbing that members of the liberal-left and liberal media in the United States --- who years ago would have decried a government viciously cracking down on protesters --- seem to be supporting Trudeau’s martial-law tactics.

  CNN correspondent Paula Newton, for instance, said the truckers’ act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.”

  Turley said,  “Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars of damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy.”

  The fundraising site, GofundMe, which previously helped in the funding of the Black Lives Matter protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them, Turley said.

  The attorney added, “The freezing of funds supporting the truckers laid bare the anti-free-speech trend sweeping the world, including in the US. There is no principled basis for cutting off the ability of citizens to support other citizens in a campaign of civil disobedience.”

  You get the feeling that most liberals and people on the left dismiss the truckers as a bunch of uneducated, white working-class racists who are probably admirers of Donald Trump. So in their view, these people are not worthy of being granted traditional rights of free speech and if they get slapped around by the police, then so be it.

  This, of course, is totally wrong. People have the right to free speech and the right to protest even if a majority of other people in the society don’t like what they’re saying. The right of free speech and the right of association cannot be selective.

  There is a concern that what happened in Canada to the Freedom Convoy could be a preview of coming attractions in the United States.

  The people in the United States have to be ever vigilant in protecting our core rights set forth in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. We cannot allow what happened in Canada to happen here.