Of course, the tyranny training wheels were the covid restrictions and mandates, along with showers of cash disbursements to shore up dependence.  Andrea Widburg explains the process in her American Thinker article Canada really is turning into a police state before our eyes. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

One of the hallmarks of liberty is a reliable legal system. In totalitarian countries, one of the ways you control people is to keep them perpetually off-balance. The law and its application are utterly unpredictable. People become paralyzed and dare not do anything that might offend the regime, lest they get destroyed.

And that’s what we’re seeing in Canada, where the newly dictatorial government is making no pretense of abiding by the rule of law.

A very specific aspect of the rule of law is that new laws are not applied retroactively. In a free country, one with a safe, reliable legal system, if it was legal for you to buy a croissant on Monday, the fact that the law changed on Tuesday to make croissants illegal does not mean that the police can come and arrest you for that Monday croissant. In a police state, of course, the police can arrest you at any time for anything, including engaging in conduct that was legal when you engaged in it.

With that in mind, I give you a series of tweets from Mark Strahl, a Canadian Member of Parliament (so we must assume, for now, that he’s telling the truth):

 

Every Canadian should be offended by this serious retroactive punishment. Briane herself went public and posted, whether jokingly or not, that “The Libz are all outside my house.” She seems cheerful enough in tone but that sounds unpleasant.

Tellingly, one person implied that Briane deserved to be punished for conduct that was not criminal at the time she acted because some members of the group she supported intimidated (without physical violence) a reporter from an outlet relentlessly hostile to the truckers.

Think about that: This person believes that, because a random crowd that got angry at a reporter who works for an outlet that has been demonizing them, Briane should be financially destroyed. That’s neither justice nor the rule of law. That’s sheer, tyrannical viciousness.

[ Meanwhile independent reporters were assaulted by police to keep them from recording their activities]

And keep in mind that this new attitude on the part of the truckers—and attitude that still hasn’t turned to violence—began only after Trudeau, who first demonized and “otherized” them, began to use the vast power of the state to destroy them.

David Suissa, writing at the Jewish Journal, made a telling point about the moment when Canada went from a free country, that allowed people to express their views and petition their government, to a totalitarian country. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

On February 24, 2020, a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Deepak Gupta, delivered a lecture to the Bar arguing that “the right to dissent is the most important right granted by the Constitution.”

Gupta took the ancient idea of challenging authority and gave it dignity: “To question, to challenge, to verify, to ask for accountability from the government is the right of every citizen under the constitution,” he said. “These rights should never be taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund society, which will not be able to develop any further.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would have done well to study Gupta’s address. When he responded to truckers protesting vaccine mandates by saying they had “unacceptable views,” he was undermining the fundamental right to dissent. He was saying, in essence: You have no right to think this way.

George Orwell would have recognized Trudeau’s statement. According to Justin “Big Brother” Trudeau, the truckers and their supporters had engaged in “crimethink” or “thoughtcrimes.” In other words, as Orwell explained, they were thinking about bad things such as liberty and equality.

The moment the government defines thoughtcrimes and then uses the power of the state to destroy those who engage in them, you have entered the world of tyranny.

Comment

Questions remain.  Will Liberal parliamentarians rein in their egomaniac, or are they as lost as the US Democrats? Will Canadian jurists defend the rule of law, or will they aid and abet the government as is the case with January 6 protesters in the US?

There is a petition asking the Governor General to dissolve the government for violating the Canadian Constitution. Another petition calls on Canadian Parliamentarians to revoke the use of The Emergencies Act.  Will anyone dare sign them lest their finances be seized?

In Other News:

Woman trampled by Trudeau’s forces during freedom protest identified as Indigenous elder
Ottawa police said no one was injured and someone threw a bike at a police horse.  In fact, Sero is in hospital having reportedly suffered a broken clavicle from the trampling, The “bike” was her walker which was also trampled.

Police in Paris Do the Unexpected

For the 32nd Saturday in a row, Parisians took to the streets to demand the end of COVID restrictions & vaccine passports. Except, this time, the police joined the protesters. A French commentator has said that the police were not so much joining in as they were drifting along with a peaceful crowd to ensure that the protest remained orderly. Most police forces in the West (including America and Canada) would do well to follow this model—ensuring peace while allowing the people to exercise their inherent right to confront their governments. 

Comment: 

The police response to protesters in Quebec City has been respectful of peoples’ rights both to protest and also for others to go on with their lives during the protests.