The crackdown against the Freedom Convoy has begun in Canada, both on the ground and in the financial sphere. Some days ago, PM Justin Trudeau announced his implementation of the Emergencies Act to target the truckers as terrorists, including having the ability to freeze bank accounts without due process.
We are seeing the first results of that, as explained by Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, who decided this was all just hilarious. That’s before she started wildly twitching, which seems to be a thing she does often. Perhaps that’s part of a medical condition, but it appears Freeland just has panic attacks when speaking in public.
This is incredibly disturbing, both because of the flippancy with which she talks about these actions and because of how totalitarian the actions themselves are.
“De-banking” has become a term to describe the act of the government colluding with the banking system to target individuals with “adverse” political views. We’ve seen various examples of that over the years, but the push to punish people for wrong-think financially has really gained steam over the last year or so. Using terrorist financing laws, as Canada is doing, to freeze bank accounts without due process is a tactic meant to intimidate and silence. After all, if government officials can take your livelihood with the stroke of a pen, is it really worth opposing them?
That these authoritarian officials appear to have no fear in doing what they are doing is jarring but expected. There will be no consequences for their actions, and certainly, the media won’t hold them accountable. In fact, they can apparently count on the author of “Liberal Fascism” to whitewash the whole thing as not preferable, but also not that bad.
Yes, the word “totalitarian” does, in fact, have a definition. Per the Oxford dictionary, here’s what it is.
relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
What are Trudeau and his cohorts doing? Well, they are centralizing their power to act in a dictatorial way in order to demand subservience to the state’s will. That sounds rather totalitarian to me. Now, I realize bad-faith actors will want to quibble over the details, claiming that other parts of Canada’s system remain free from such interference, but doing so is incredibly obtuse. Modern political actions can be totalitarian in nature without being the equivalent of what happened in Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany.
What’s going on in Canada is not just sliding down a slippery slope. It’s strapping on skis and hitting a black diamond run — and that’s by design. Using the banking system to go after political opponents was always going to be the biggest threat to free speech in the future. That we are now seeing the first large-scale, government-sponsored steps in normalizing that from a supposedly free nation should disturb everyone. What’s the limiting principle here? Any honest onlooker will admit there isn’t one. Trudeau has given himself powers that essentially give him free rein to ruthlessly crush anyone who challenges his will.
Calling that totalitarianism may make some soft-spined conservatives feel icky, but that’s exactly what it is. And rest assured that if Donald Trump had taken such action during the 2020 BLM riots, they’d be singing a far different tune.