This discussion came on line this week.  For those who prefer reading, I provide an excerpted, lightly edited transcript below in order to learn what these two make of recent events in the country, and what lessons for other vulnerable democracies. Their words are in italics with my bolds.

Hello everyone I’m here today with a man who needs no introduction to Canadians, and increasingly less so to an international audience of people watching Mr. Rex Murphy, one of Canada’s most revered and able journalists. We’re going to talk today about Canada and the Canadian government and try to get to the bottom of what’s happening, insofar as the two of us can manage that.

Rex, I thought to start with just some notes that I had on the pandemic, since in some ways it’s at the bottom of current events. So NPR announced on December 27th that omicron could bring the worst surge of Covid yet in the US and fast. But I was watching that, and it was after data had already come in from South Africa that was quite credible in suggesting that omicron was much less deadly although more transmissible than delta. And it appears now that it’s perhaps 90 percent less. So the current data, insofar as you can trust it, suggests that vaccines are approximately 35 percent again effective against immigrant infection and perhaps 70 percent against hospitalization. So that’s the reality of the pandemic at this point.

I’ll add one more thing for a minute and then turn it over to you. Well that data has been making itself manifest over the last few months. Pandemic mandate restriction reductions have occurred in a variety of major countries including Denmark, England, Sweden, Norway, Spain and Italy, a relatively admirable set of countries. Let’s point out that in the last two weeks in Canada Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and PEI also relaxed restrictions. Yet our country is under the equivalent of martial law, that is not too extreme a term I think. And we’re in worse shape politically than perhaps we’ve ever been. So you’ve had a vast and long experience watching the Canadian political scene. So what do you make of this?

Well first of all it’s very difficult to find a single sentence answer. I’m not being cute .I’ve watched this stuff with me being the witness from the days back in the 1950s. I’m an ancient old bastard.

When Joey Smallwood was in many ways a fairly tyrannical premier at the end of his days. And I thought I learned then as a teenager what overreach was like and even in a minuscule circumstance like Newfoundland. It’s not Russia or United States, but nonetheless when you get in charge how over time, you lose or diminish the few noble impulses that you may have come in with. And become completely obsessed with yourself.

To go right to your question however, it really is very difficult that after two years and very sporadically effective measures: Don’t take the masks they’ll hurt you; Take the mask; Ignoring the old age homes; The economic ruin that’s going on. After we go through two whole years of this and then the third period you mentioned omicron comes in. The information comes by and as you point out major and responsible countries after the two years realize that okay, we’re into a milder circumstance, and we cannot continue claustrophobically to restrict our citizens from their basic rights. Serious countries start to lift the mandates and also at the tail as you mentioned some of the provinces in Canada.

And at this point a single group, the truckers who for two years were going around delivering food and being regarded as heroes. As people have pointed out, they live solitary lives, they’re alone in their trucks. But after two years at the very end, a core of those truckers arose. And it could be from principles of civil liberties, it could be because they believe that they’ve already had Covid, in other words there’s a whole host of rational reasons that some people would say: No. I have an occupation and it’s two years later all these things are going away but instead they’ve threatened their livelihoods.

And then to make this point, they say to Ottawa, they say to their own politicians: Why are you doing this? You know we have worked even while others have not worked; we have worked as hard as the medical staff, as hard as the grocery clerks. And we are the people bringing you the food and, by the way, supplies for the hospitals. So of all the people to single out, it’s the working-class truckers. They go across Canada in the middle of the winter. There’s a week’s warning and, here’s the key:

At no point did any substantial authority, backbencher, minister, minister of finance or prime minister send out either a delegation or himself to say to these guys and gals in these trucks, who are the heart and soul of this country.

“Come in and let’s have a chat. We’re Canadians, we talk about things. We have we have prided ourselves ever so much that we’re polite and we’re so compromising we say sorry when someone else hits us. So where did the the intrinsic ethic of the Canadian temperament disappear? Instead of saying,OMG, what what a joy it would be to talk to someone who’s not in cabinet, to someone who does a job, who has kept society functioning. If you guys have problems, i really want to speak to you because I’m your prime minister and I’m also the prime minister of Canada

But no talk, none at all, this is the thing that really got my temper up. Instead, out of the blue like like some dark wizard, he comes down on them; they’re racists, they’re misogynists, they’re only a small fringe. But they’re taking up space and we can’t tolerate that. I really do not know what was in his mind. What was in the minds of his superlative advisors, presuming that they have them? And I’m also surprised that the Liberal caucus, how come all those backbenchers, some of them from the Atlantic provinces who know the working class, who know fishermen and loggers and miners and oil workers and truckers. They’re a class: Does no one stand up for them, and then let the prime minister rail at them? And Mr Singh saying that these are white supremacists and they’re calling Islam a disease?

Whenever I hear the word irresponsible directed at the Ottawa protest, it turns me upside down. One more final point and I’ll shut up. When in America or in Canada have you seen a two and a half week protest by BLM or Antifa or some environmental group like this one: not a window smashed, not a police officer attacked, no burning of buildings, no shouting curse words at the police forces, no intimidation. This has been a classic Canadian protest in this sense. It’s a working class protest, so it’s not professionals. And secondly, considering what’s at stake, livelihood and restriction of civil liberties, and despite an inflammatory rejection from the prime minister, in fact the last two weeks have been this tranquil. That’s a new bloom in the idea of Canadian temperament.

You and I were told a couple of months ago by advisers to high-level government officials that the Covid policy was essentially being dictated by opinion polls, something we will get back to: This reliance by government leaders now on experts and on opinion polls. But we should also point out that although many countries in Europe had started to lift vaccine mandates and lifted in many of the United States, none of that was occurring in Canada. Not until the truckers started this protest. So now these five provinces have started to lift their mandates, and more are going to follow.

They aren’t claiming that’s a consequence of the trucker protest. But in truth we know that this is being run by opinion polls, which is a terrible way to run a government. Nothing had changed before the truckers started to protest. We should also point out the 86 percent vaccination rate in Canada; that’s one dose vaccination anyway. No one with any sense would ever think that it possible to push vaccine rates above approximately 90 percent. Because 10 percent of the population is not in the condition necessary even to comply voluntarily with mandates. It’s terribly naive to assume it can be pushed beyond that.

Let’s go through a couple of issues, a list of things we can discuss.

We want to figure out why were the truckers demonized, and what are Canadians supposed to think about that? Especially because FINTRAC which tracks financial transactions and is supposed to be taking care of such things as terrorist financing, has no evidence of suspicious transactions occurring in relationship to this protest. That’s been documented by CTV, who you could hardly accuse of being sympathetic to the truckers.

So there’s that. Then, just exactly what is the emergency here? Why is it reasonable under any conditions whatsoever to consider this an emergency of such major proportions that our basic civil liberties have to be lifted?

Then the ability to freeze and seize bank accounts, which generates distrust in the banks.

There’s the precedent to define retroactive crime, because now funding a perfectly legal protest through legal means has been criminalized and associated with terrorism and organized crime and can be punished without trial by fiat and that appears to be permanent.

Then we have the extension and redefinition of crime because mischief has now been expanded as a category to arrest people without cause. And now you can aid and abet mischief.

And then they compelled the tow truck operators to start operating and Trudeau said they would get just compensation.

And then, you’ve been beating this drum for a long time, we’ve been governed essentially without parliament for two years.

It’s very hard to say what is the worst thing is that happened to Canada in the last two weeks, because six things are the worst. Each of them should be fatal to the Trudeau government. But I think perhaps the worst was the decision to suspend parliament on Friday from discussing the emergency act because of the action instituted by the police as a consequence of the emergency act.

Let’s start with what you talked about, Trudeau’s state of mind with regards to the truckers. Like he’s accused the Conservatives of supporting the people who wave swastikas and and tried to associate the truckers with Nazis. And went after a Jewish Conservative MP and hasn’t apologized for that. Do you think that Trudeau believes that the truckers are actually some kind of far right MAGA movement or what?

That one just leaves me speechless. It is impossible to believe that he believes it. If you’ll have two or three thousand people and there is a placard up with a swastika on it, it’s a nasty thing but it’s implying that the government is the bunch. And the news media and Trudeau take this idiot and his scribbled damn swastika, and they tried to paint as Nazis tens of thousands of these truckers who came across Canada with every highway overpass and at least a third of the country is saying thank god that someone is expressing something.

The Conservatives are feeble and they haven’t been present enough, I could go on about them forever, but the idea that they’re Nazis? This is not even grade six thinking. This is ridiculous. And I have to say this: one guy was wearing a raccoon mask walking around with the confederate flag.  It was absurd, it has no consequence. But the news media sucked on that like they were a hungry baby.

Let’s talk about the news media. First we might as well remember that one of the ways Mussolini defined fascism is the integration of corporation and state. So let’s talk about the legacy media in Canada.

♦ 595 million dollar salary subsidy in the last four years.
♦ 1.2 billion annually for the CBC. It’s also been recommended to the CBC that they decrease rather than increase their reliance on private advertising.
♦ 60 million pandemic specific emergency support fund
♦ 10 million special measures for journalism top up for 2021 and 22
♦ recent request for 60 million dollars by the Toronto Star, probably the loudest rag in the country beating the Trudeau drum, describing a 30 million dollar annual shortfall in their operating budget.

What Canadians are faced with at the moment is an awful press/government collusion.  Typical Canadians believed for years in the reality of peace, order and good government. Trusted our constitutional principles, and that our fundamental institutions were essentially reliable: government, education, media. Let’s say you could count on them to at least try to tell the truth under most circumstances. Trudeau is now facing them with a very difficult choice: You either believe that all of those institutions have become corrupt and unreliable in a profound and frightening way, including now the banks; or you can believe there’s a handful of protesters who have far right ties and can be justly demonized. I suspect for many Canadians it’s easier to believe the latter, especially when that’s what the prime minister and his cronies are saying.

Unfortunately, and I say this as someone with a fair bit of respect for fundamental institutions and wish that they would operate properly, unfortunately the former is has perhaps proved itself in the last two weeks to be far more true than even the most cautious and worried of us might have predicted even a month ago.

Well there’s a whole lot of things to say about that. I’ll start even on the broader scale. Take somebody who is not a partisan and who hasn’t got some some infectious radical ideas about one side of the spectrum or the other; in other words someone who’s reasonable balanced probably switches back and forth between tory and liberal, or republican and democrat. Those were the days of equilibrium or or easy shift or disagreement in their history.

If you look at America in particular, because it connects to us by the way, look at America and American journalism in the last five and six years: the growth especially at the cable channels and the the absolute surrender to the most vile partisanship. On the whole Russia collusion thing, if you read some of the sane people, Molly Hemingway’s book for example, you realize that it was all confection. It was all composed, was all made up, and the savagery with which during the Trump years any detail got into the CBC wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.

Up here in Canada on the very day that the stallions were going into parliament hill, you had the coastal gas line attack by 20 masked people with axes who threatened people in the cabs of their trucks. It was close to 24 hours before that even got reporters on CBC.

What I’m getting to, even apart from the money, the press as an institution despite many exceptions, the mass of the institution has decided it is a player. It will pick a side, it will inflate the people that it likes to inflate, and it will derogate and damn those that it does not. They will do that from a perch of self-assumed moral superiority. You you need to know they have forgotten that their audience has intelligence and dignity. They really think that it’s more or less a cooperative movement between the elites of government bureaucracy, the university and the press. Then when some low-class operation occurs, some bunch of big hat truckers coming, the reaction is: Who are these people interrupting our complacency and tranquility?

To come to your point, it would have been impossible 50 years ago for any institutional press to say, oh by the way we see ourselves as opposition because that’s what a press is. It inquires, it pushes, it tests, but at the same time incidentally, most of our operation is getting funded by the people we’re dealing with.

Also the close cohabitation of the high-class journalists with the people that they cover, the sociability of Ottawa is one of the most corrosive things to a free press that we ever knew.

But I will tell you, this doesn’t show up on the newscast very often, but when you talk to what iIcall the guy in the street, they know that 600 million dollars goes to the press. They are not watching anymore. Not only that, when the press then say, oh this has been a terrible ordeal for us in Ottawa, no one was touched by their complaints. Working people have been putting up with this condescension, dismissal of their jobs. They’re loud, they’re taking up space, they shouldn’t be tolerated, who is this? And this is coming out of the mouth of a prime minister who more than any other thing set himself up as the virtue emperor of all the world. He was more tolerant, more liberal, more broad-minded. He was for all all sorts of diversity, except diversity for the people who actually keep the country going

So yes, the press is a part of this dynamic, part of this crisis. I don’t know where we go from here, but there’s been an awful lot of diminished respect, dignity and prestige for both the government, including the opposition parties too, and the press during this. As we say in the ancient thing the truckers might have lost the battle, but they they’ve altered the perception of many things very deeply.

Because it’s happening so quickly, I don’t know what to make of all of this. I can’t believe the state to which the country is degenerated. I’ve been in contact with a reliable source within the Canadian military. He told me today by email that if I had any sense I’d take my money out of the Canadian banks because the situation is far worse than I’ve been informed. That’s just one of many such messages I receive on a daily basis.

Let’s talk about the banks. Our prime minister last week permanently destroyed 20 percent of the population’s faith in the entire Canadian banking system and stained the Canadian banking system’s international reputation for decades. In any normal time that in itself would have been enough grounds for a non-confidence vote for the government to be ousted. And that’s only one of the seven things that happened last week that are of that magnitude.

Let’s talk about this emergency for a minute. I talked to Brian Peckford, the former premier of Newfoundland a couple of weeks ago about the fact the mandates themselves weren’t justifiable. The emergency clause in the charter allows for the suspension of certain basic rights under certain conditions. The covid mandates themselves weren’t justifiable especially now and now the ante has been raised a tremendous degree. Because we have a new emergency which is apparently more serious than the entire covid pandemic that justifies the imposition of martial law, the seizing of bank accounts and the retroactive definition of crime, and so on.

I’ll ask you to play devil’s advocate just for a minute. Imagine that you’re on the side of Trudeau and and that true to the government, you’re trying to make the case that this is an emergency justifying the imposition of martial law. What’s the emergency exactly? Give me some evidence that there’s an emergency of any sort.

I accept the challenge to be a devil’s advocate. Let me just really try it. What is the thing that is making the canadian state tremble to the point of its own dissolution? Are all the provincial capitals under seizure? No, don’t think so. How about, the Russians are coming down from the north and they’ve got the fleet of the highest gunnery. Not that either. Maybe it’s inflation and if we kill the truckers, you know we ruined them, we solve that. No. Okay great imposition, I’ll go that far.  There was a great imposition on the kind of comfort and tranquility of Ottawa. But there’s been an awful lot of imposition on the tranquilities of every person in this country for the last two years. You couldn’t visit your sick mother if she was in an old age home.

Where’s the threat? There isn’t one. This was just the longest most sustained and almost celebratory thing that was crushed. You can read it and you can see the live pictures from people who are not in the news media. If even a delegation of the Trudeau cabinet had walked down the streets of Ottawa and had enough parkas that they could sit outdoors and spend two hours talking to some of these real people, this could have been washed away.

Let me let me try to be the advocate. So we’re going to say this is a radical right wing movement, and it’s funded by MAGA money flowing in from the United States. And that there’s a real threat of a January 6 style insurrection. So as a consequence to protect Ottawa and the stability of the state, we have to make the trucker convoy illegal. And then we have to hunt everyone down and track whoever donated, because they’re part of this extreme far-right network that has its origins in the United States and the entire integrity of the state is at stake. Does anyone believe that? I don’t get it, don’t even see how this is a wise move strategically for the Liberals.

Well I tell you there is a reason why they believe it, because this is why i brought up the United States it wasn’t idle. They had a sustained four years of believing what was not true south of the border. I’m stating this with definitive force. It simply wasn’t true: Putin did not own Trump. Now people might not like to hear that, but it was a confection. It was a setup and yet all of the great investigative powers of some of the greatest journals and television stations in all the world went with it day and night. Yet now you have, for example, Mr Biden’s son with his contracts and these Chinese not even to be mentioned

Here’s how it comes to be, this far right white supremacy movement. I see the phrase white supremacy so often and I wonder where is this coming from? There will always be is some fanatically stupid set of people with some fanatically stupid cause, but there has not been (to use this word) a pandemic of racist white challenge. but it’s been the fodder of the new speak and the woke dialect. And it’s been shoved out so often that if you say the word MAGA now, this is where Minister of Justice Lametti comes in. He said you know, if you’re pro-Trumpian, you should worry about your funds. I can go down to Newfoundland and go from Cornerbrook to Saint John’s and then up up to Saint Anthony, and I will not meet anyone who is pro-Trumpian.

It’s just silly but if you have if you pound it hard enough and long enough people will believe it. I can’t think of any other reason than belief in something like that that could possibly justify what’s happening because i can’t imagine any alternative explanations.

Okay the Liberal government has decided to implement a state of emergency. So here’s a psychological explanation. Trudeau’s father did that back in the 1970s and Justin is constantly trying to prove his validity as a figure of masculine integrity, and I think there’s probably some of that going on. Because if there wasn’t, he wouldn’t have run for prime minister to begin with. Because he’s so supremely unqualified to be prime minister that it’s a complete bloody miracle that anyone could be narcissistic enough to assume that with that little knowledge, a role like that should be adopted. So that’ definitely a factor. He’s got to stand up and show that he can do it under duress, and then there’s also got to be the belief that something like a far-right conspiracy is occurring. Because invoking the the martial law act, the emergency act is so preposterous a move that unless you actually believe there was a signal threat of that paranoid sort, there’s no way you could justify it strategically. How could anyone, including Chrystia Freeland by the way, think this is going to go over well over a period approximating a month.

I read the other day that because FINTRAC never found any evidence of radical foreigners colluding in a right-wing manner to fund the freedom convoy, that most of the information that the government depended on was actually generated by the CBC. So then we have this feedback loop.

A whole other bloody insane catastrophe was when that funding site was hacked by a crazy activist and then that information was distributed, stolen information which is technically illegal. And the media jumped on that and the government capitalized on it. It’s got to be that they believe their own press.

That’s so interesting because they bought the press and paid it to tell them what they wanted to hear and now they believe it and justify their their policy as a consequence.

Maybe there is a substantial fantasy that is operative in the entire liberal cabinet and could be Mr. Trudeau actually believes there is a genuine threat of MAGA overthrow and Trumpian forces. There are 30 plus people in his cabinet, they can’t all share that fantasy and if we have 30 people. Where are the five or six people in his own cabinet or in his own caucus that are saying Justin you have really, vastly overreached. You have insulted the nature of this country which is always the middle course, is always willing to at least try a compromise and a talk. And you’ve introduced false drama, the melodramatic idea of a great national emergency that will flare across the world.

Let’s look at what the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh did then. Singh tweeted, “today Conservative MPs have endorsed a convoy led by those that claim the superiority of the white bloodline and equate Islam to a disease.”

This is quite the insult. If anything he’s more juvenile, immature and narcissistic than Trudeau, and that’s really saying something. I was involved with the NDP to some degree going back to the War Measures declared in the 1970s. I knew a fair number of the leaders of the provincial parties and a lot of those people had come up through the labor union movement and actaully cared about the working class. I’m not saying that about all the socialists, but a high proportion of their leaders were genuinely concerned with the well-being of the working class labor union types and the NDP back then opposed the war measures act on principle.

Yet today Jagmeet Singh is and the followers of the NDP are those most set against what the truckers have done. He’s following Trudeau around like a lap dog.  Mr Singh will will win every student council election in Canada but his relationship to the working people, the oil men, the loggers, the fishermen, the farmers, the service people, and the truckers, he is anathema. By the way, I’m not NDP, but I can respect their history and admire them for that.

You know, even the Communist Party of Canada announced yesterday that they weren’t in favor of the emergency act because they realized well enough that allows instantaneously for the demonization and and the criminalization of anything like organized labor protests. 

Even if the government is right when they are reaching for ultimate and and overriding civil liberties it is then your duty to stand up and test it and challenge it. And exert the greatest pressure to explain themselves, to justify the boundaries they are imposing.

Yet in this particular case on the very day they brought in this thing and let the police loose on the protesters, that’s the day that parliament doesn’t even meet.

Let’s talk about that Friday event because this actually needs focus. I don’t understand why all the MPs on the conservative side just didn’t go to parliament anyways. Canadians have to think this through. We had martial law imposed and it’s supposed to be debated in parliament. Not to mention the fact there’s been no parliament for two years. On the very day it’s supposed to be debated in parliament, the government announces it’s going to suspend parliament! Not because of Covid but because of the dangers of the situation they created to stop debate about that very measure. And everyone went along with it, you really cannot make this up.

Conservatives have a mass of MPs yet they didn’t go to parliament yesterday and they shouldn’t be flying home. They should have gone down in a cluster and walked the streets. They should have at least had conversations, not anything else. How is this going, what are they doing, when do you think you would leave? Show them that their representatives actually want to talk to the people that they represent.

And secondly they should be at extreme volume. They have been tepid, they have been removed and there is no vigorous, no clamorous opposition to this, the biggest thing that has happened since the imposition of the war measures act, which saw people picked off the street and put into jail. This is a really really big thing that could deepen the cleavages we already have in this country. It’s a dismissal again of a majority of people who are out west. Canada is not Ontario and Quebec, however wonderful those provinces are. But it’s becoming the case if you’re not woke and you’re not in the laptop class, and if you’re not professionally insulated from all the pressures of Covid, you’re out. If you can ride around easily, you’re in one world and can look down on those who keep the country functioning, who fix the water mains, who deliver the goods. If those people start to feel the pressure and say to their government we want our concerns heard, oh well they’re radicals, they’re hypocrites, islamophobes. They’re misogynists, naturally they’re racists and also of course they probably are bunching up to being Trump terrorists.

So I would say. three or four things happened in the absence of parliament.   One is the abdication of executive and legislative responsibility to hypothetical experts on the public health side claiming to follow the science by following the experts. Yet there’s no automatic pathway passing from medical facts to valid policy. The only pathway from facts to policy is through parliament and through the executive branch. It’s thinking through the problems in public in the house of commons and in the provincial parliaments rather than to devolve all their responsibilities onto medical experts and claim compassion and wisdom in doing so and demonize conscientious objectors saying you’re not following the science. So that’s number one: It’s government by fiat and government by experts and what constitutes appropriate lawmaking restricted to one dimension, which is putative public health conceived of in an extraordinarily narrow sense without debate

The next thing is the fact that all these bloody governments including provincial governments in Canada have started to rely on nothing but opinion polls as a means of sampling what the public thinks. Let’s go into that psychologically for a moment. You know according to the polls, Canadians now simultaneously don’t want the mandates and don’t support the truckers. It doesn’t take a bloody genius to notice those two things are at odds, and so you might think how clueless is the public. But the right conclusion is: How stupid are we to rely on opinion polls. Because it’s extraordinarily difficult to sample what the public thinks. By the way these polls are also highly methodologically suspect and some of them are partisan.

The reason we have institutions like parliament, in fact the whole actual reason we have institutions like parliament is that’s a much better method of determining over a long period and in a sustained way what the public thinks. When many of them are together discussing over many weeks, and then all of that’s organized into something approximating a free political system. Opinion polls subvert all of that.

One of the functions as old as there is a parliament, and especially the mother of all parliaments, is set forth in the parliamentary reform bill of 1832. It states that the debate itself is an agency of the establishment of public opinion and if you don’t have the arguments and the debate, then opinion has no way to fashion itself or to respond to or to modify previous positions.

If you cannot have a discussion in the parliamentary chamber about bringing in the most serious piece of legislation that we’ve seen in 50 years, what is the point of parliament?

Well, it’s to be an impediment. To understand why let’s go down deeper into Trudeau’s motivation. Both Chrystia Freeland and Trudeau are integrally associated with the World Economic Forum which promotes a globalist agenda. This might sound like right-wing propaganda, but they publicly assert a globalist elite agenda that is aimed at severely modifying the manner in which our fundamental institutions operate under the what would you call the impetus of yet another crisis, which is the hypothetical climate crisis.

I am an admirer of Bjorn Lomberg, who I think has done the best work on this matter all things considered. He’s got the best methodology for determining how to analyze what steps should be taken to deal with environmental concerns; let’s not call them emergencies. He’s documented it very carefully and I defy anyone on the climate catastrophe side to show evidence of a methodology more sophisticated than Bjorn Lomborg’s in analyzing an actual pathway forward that isn’t merely apocalyptic neuroticism and the desire for totalitarian control.

And so that’s all lurking in the background and that’s also pulling the country apart in all sorts of ways It’s underneath events like this attack that occurred in Northern BC the other day on the on the other coastal gas line. It’s an attempt to block infrastructure ensuring that we all have cheap reliable energy as we move forward into the future.

I worked on the UN Secretary General’s report on Sustainable Development for two years analyzing all this sort of material. That’s where I came across Lomberg trying to sort this stuff out. From this I learned that if you look deeply into the data from as many different perspectives as you could manage, let’s say with an open heart, you would derive the conclusion that the faster we can get cheap energy to the world’s poor people the better. And the cheaper energy is mostly going to be fossil fuels especially natural gas if we do it right. The more sustainable environmental movement we can have in the future is if we make the poorest people rich by giving them access to cheap energy mostly facilitated by fossil fuel. That’s the best possible move forward for the planet and for those who are absolutely poor, and the faster we move toward clean energy.

Those who say they are on the side of the oppressed, the side of the poor but are against cheap fossil fuel energy can’t have it both ways. All the bloody moralistic posturing is enough to drive you to distraction. It is so patrician and so patronizing. By the way it has a hundred percent support from every possible major media. but it is a craze. And by the way we just put in over 500 billion dollars of the deficit, over a trillion dollars of a debt. Oil is now ramping up to 80 or 100 dollars a barrel and the Canadian government has seized Alberta, built a concrete wall around it, so that the greatest natural resource we have is frozen.

Maybe the emergencies that we’re seeing this week is one way of forestalling the knowledge that they have hit a time of inflation after two years of economic disaster, while closing down the one source of wealth that we have.

There’s definitely a moral hazard here. There’s nothing more psychologically attractive than a false crisis to divert attention from a real crisis. Talking with people in the economic disciplines, it was pointed out to me rather forcefully that over the last 15 years Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has remained relatively constant at $43,000 while America’s has moved from approximately the same to now at $65,000.

Just one of many indicators that Canada is in a state of economic crisis, the magnitude of which has not yet been entirely revealed and meanwhile the country is tearing itself apart at the seams. And so why not have a false crisis because then you can look heroic when you’re dealing with something that doesn’t exist. You can beat down the Nazis and the Confederates instead of facing the fact you’ve been so appallingly incompetent and moralistic over the last six years. The true nature of that economic decline has been hidden, but may soon become manifest.

After the two years we haven’t got the inventory of how many businesses have failed, how many families have been disjointed or depressed and made anxious, how much the overall economy itself has been hurt. We don’t know yet if once the banks start to rise their interest rates how this debt will drown us. We also have inflation. But the biggest thing of all didn’t happen because of a disease or a pandemic. I’ve been at this far too long but I’m not exaggerating when saying I can’t remember a time when there are sharper differences, more angry divisions. We’ve had contests in the past between provinces and big fights over pipelines and transmission lines and such, but it was never carried out with animosity, it never called up the brands. In 50, 60 years I never heard people called Nazis because they said something the others didn’t like.

A man comes in and basically says to the world I am the personification of all that is new and correct in 21st century virtue. I am sanctified by my own correctness on all of the genuine issues and will build a tranquility founded in respect for all Canadians. And six years later you’ve got stallions on parliament hill running into walkers; you’ve got the police probably being forced to do stuff that they don’t want to; you have a parliament that’s been eviscerated or castrated; the biggest debt ever; the west is angry.

Let’s just summarize this. Canadians are being asked to decide whether these truckers are a reprehensible bunch of foreign-funded Nazi insurrectionists, or whether the entire governing structure in Canada and the press that reports on it has become corrupt in an historically unmatched manner. So that’s a tough choice. But the first part of that isn’t true and the second part unfortunately is.

And you can tell that not least by the fact that parliament has essentially been abrogated over the last two years and more particularly on Friday. And now we have retroactive crime in this country and the seizure of bank accounts. And all this is occurring when not only is the pandemic coming to a halt on technical grounds, but when many countries around the world are lifting mandates which would not have been lifted in Canada unless the truckers had protested.

That’s in a background of devolving of executive responsibility to experts and to opinion by all three political parties; the abandonment of the working class by the NDP and the imposition of a utopian globalist agenda on the entire country and its economy. That’s basically where we’re at.

This is a sad sad mess and in the immediate future, in the next 12 months we’re going to hear so many ramifications out of this; we’ve done a great injury that may not be easily repaired over time. The biggest worry of all isn’t the convoy or the clearing of the protest; it’s the nature of the country and the harmony that wants it new.

Update Feb. 23  Emergency Measures Revoked

Just a day after MPs approved it and potentially hours before being put to vote in the Senate, emergency measures invoked by the Trudeau Liberals last week have been revoked by cabinet decision.

Conservative Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu suggested on Twitter the prime minister decided to revoke the act instead of risking it being voted down by the Senate.

“The Prime Minister knew the Senate would not support him. He chose to back down rather than to admit defeat,” wrote Boisvenu in French.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association welcomed the government’s decision to revoke the measures — describing the move as “overdue.”

“We also continue to believe that it is important for the courts to comment on the legal threshold and constitutional issues so as to guide the actions of future governments,” said CCLA spokesperson Abby Deshman in a statement.

“Even though the orders are no longer in force, Canadians are left with the precedent that the government’s actions have set.”

She said the CCLA’s litigation against the government would continue.

 

Graham Shearer writes at First Things The Price of a Permanent Emergency. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Governments across the globe have taken extreme measures over the past two years to combat COVID-19. The rationale is always the same: This is an emergency. But do governments understand the implications of this claim? A perpetual state of crisis cannot be a stable basis for civil government. Politicians who continually appeal to this justification may soon find they have unleashed forces beyond their control.

It is hard to live in a state of emergency for two years or more, especially when it affects everything from the air in front of your face to your ability to travel. Throughout the pandemic, many have repeated Milton Friedman’s quip that “there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.” They were warning that the “exceptional circumstances” justifying emergency measures might prove enduring. Unfortunately, this warning has become our reality. Governments that were quick to impose restrictions have been reticent to rescind them, and many measures may not be rescinded at all. Leaders have learned that they can mandate masks, confine citizens to their homes, and limit public life to those who have had a certain medical procedure. Once leaders taste such powers, it is tempting to cling to them.

And even where some restrictions are loosening, governments are not relinquishing the right to impose such restrictions.

This month, Scotland is set to renew the Coronavirus Act, which granted the Scottish government emergency powers earlier in the pandemic. If this happens, by the time the powers expire, the government will have had emergency powers for two and half years. Never mind that in 2020, the rate of age-adjusted all-cause mortality in Scotland was lower than in 2009. In Scotland, as in many other countries, vaccine passports, mask mandates, school closures, and lockdowns appear to have become part of the magistrates’ governing repertoire—ready to be implemented again the moment the opportunity arises.

In an interview for Le Monde in March 2020, Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben said, “The epidemic has made clear that the state of exception to which our governments have actually accustomed us for quite some time, has become the normal condition. . . . A society that exists in a perennial state of emergency cannot be free.” Agamben had written previously about the concept of “the state of exception” in reference to the “war on terror” and the way that the threat of terrorism served to justify the suspension of civil liberties for a certain group of people. For Agamben, the novel coronavirus was simply a fresh occasion for a similar approach. Leaders used the threat of impending death and catastrophe to give the government extraordinary powers in order to defeat the enemy.

Nearly two years after Agamben spoke to Le Monde, we remain in this state of exception. It is easy to be pessimistic about the future. However, in the foreword to Where Are We Now? (2021), a collection of pandemic reflections, Agamben strikes a different note.

What accounts for the strength of the current transformation is also . . . its weakness. . . . For decades now, institutional powers have been suffering a gradual loss of legitimacy. These powers could mitigate this loss only through the constant evocation of states of emergency. . . . For how long . . . can the present state of exception be prolonged?  Agamben’s question is a good one.

A state of emergency is unstable by definition.

The current protests against vaccine mandates in Canada reveal that government authority and legitimacy are more fragile than we ordinarily suppose. For in emergencies, it is not only governments who respond. The Canadians who are protesting vaccine restrictions also appeal to extraordinary circumstances to justify their actions. After Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau complained that the protesters “are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives,” the Babylon Bee published an apt headline: “Trudeau Demands Protesters Stop Shutting Down City So That He Can Shut Down City.” Governments who claim that circumstances require extraordinary measures may find that their citizens also take extraordinary measures.

Governments cannot have it both ways: Ordinary times carry with them ordinary constitutional constraints on government action and ordinary obligations to obey and comply. If governments appeal to a permanent state of exception to elude the former, it will find that more and more people consider themselves free of the latter.

That is why, for the sake of constitutional order and legitimacy,
government claims for extraordinary powers must cease.

Now that the deadliest phase of the pandemic has passed, the real emergency, at this point, is the permanent appeal to emergency. The urgent need is for governments to abandon urgency and return to the slow, steady business of governance. Good jurisprudence and government depend on a return to precedented times. As it is, too many governments are paying the mortgage on their extraordinary powers with the capital of their legitimacy. If they persist for much longer, some may begin to find that both have been spent.

Graham Shearer is a doctoral student at Union Theological College in Belfast and a fellow of the Chalmers Institute.

Trudeau’s orders, aimed in part at cutting off funds to protesters, have a wider scope than previously reported – which is “forcing portfolio managers and securities firms to take a harder look at who they are doing business with,” according to Bloomberg.

The new rules make demands of a broad list of entities — including banks, investment firms, credit unions, loan companies, securities dealers, fundraising platforms, insurance companies and fraternal benefit societies. They must determine whether they’re in “possession or control of property” of a person who’s attending an illegal protest or providing supplies to demonstrators, according to orders published by the government late Tuesday night.

If they find such a person in their customer list, they must freeze their accounts and report it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Canada’s intelligence service, the regulations say. Any suspicious transactions must also be reported to the country’s anti-money-laundering agency, known as Fintrac. -Bloomberg

Ottawa police are handing out this leaflet:

Trudeau took the knee beside BLM protesters, and cried and apologized for century-old abuses against Aboriginals. But hard working, patriotic, ordinary Canadians have no place on his victims list. The jackboots are coming, but clever Trudeau will impose the suffering in cyberspace, and no one will notice, except those whose opinion was objectionable to him.

Vinay Prasad writes at the Tablet How the CDC Abandoned Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images. H\T Raymond

Mass youth hospitalizations, COVID-induced diabetes, and other myths from the brave new world of science as political propaganda

The agency guiding America’s pandemic policy is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which sets widely adopted policies on masking, vaccination, distancing, and other mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID and ensure the virus is less morbid when it leads to infection. The CDC is, in part, a scientific agency—they use facts and principles of science to guide policy—but they are also fundamentally a political agency: The director is appointed by the president of the United States, and the CDC’s guidance often balances public health and welfare with other priorities of the executive branch.

Throughout this pandemic, the CDC has been a poor steward of that balance, pushing a series of scientific results that are severely deficient.

This research is plagued with classic errors and biases, and does not support the press-released conclusions that often follow. In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science. The CDC’s use of this technique has severely damaged their reputation and helped lead to a growing divide in trust in science by political party. Science now risks entering a death spiral in which it will increasingly fragment into subsidiary verticals of political parties. As a society, we cannot afford to allow this to occur. Impartial, honest appraisal is needed now more than ever, but it is unclear how we can achieve it.

Masking Propaganda

In November 2020, a CDC study sought to prove that mask mandates slowed the spread of the coronavirus. The study found that counties in Kansas which implemented mask mandates saw COVID case rates start to fall (light blue below), while counties that did not saw rates continue to climb (dark blue):

The data scientist Youyang Gu immediately noted that locales with more rapid rise would be more likely to implement a mandate, and thus one would expect cases to fall more in such locations independent of masking, as people’s behavior naturally changes when risk escalates. Gu zoomed out on the same data and considered a longer horizon, and the results were enlightening: It appeared as if all counties did the same whether they masked or not:

The CDC had merely shown a tiny favorable section, depicted in the red circle above, but the subsequent pandemic waves dwarf their results. In short, the CDC’s study was not capable of proving anything and was highly misleading, but it served the policy goal of encouraging cloth mask mandates.

Child Vaccination Propaganda

Masking is not the only matter in which the CDC’s stated policy goal has coincided with very poor-quality science that was, coincidentally, published in their own journal. Consider the case of vaccination for kids between the ages of 5 and 11. COVID vaccination in this age group has stalled, which runs counter to the CDC’s goal of maximum vaccination. Interestingly, vaccinating kids between 5 and 11 is disputed globally; Sweden recently elected not to vaccinate healthy kids in this age group, and some public health experts believe that it would be preferable for kids to gain immunity from natural exposure instead. Stalling U.S. uptake therefore reflects a legitimate and open scientific debate, regardless of whether the CDC’s policy goal would like to consider it closed.

Enter the CDC’s new study. Widely covered in news outlets, the January 2022 study claims that kids below the age of 18 who get diagnosed with COVID are 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. “These findings underscore the importance of COVID-19 prevention among all age groups,” the authors write, “including vaccination for all eligible children and adolescents.” But a closer examination of the study again reveals problems.

First, it does not adjust for body mass index. Higher BMI is a risk factor for COVID, prompting hospitalization and diabetes, and yet the CDC analysis does not adjust for weight at all.

Second, the absolute risks the study finds are incredibly low. Even if the authors’ finding is true, it demonstrates an increase in diabetes of up to 6 in 10,000 COVID survivors.

Third, the CDC’s analysis uses billing record diagnoses as a surrogate for COVID cases, but many kids had and recovered from COVID without seeking medical care. Without a true denominator that conveys the actual number of COVID cases, the entire analysis might be artifact.

As the former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier told The New York Times, “The CDC erred in taking a preliminary and potentially erroneous association and tweeting it to specifically create alarm in parents.” Some might view it as a mistake, but after observing these matters for almost two years, I believe it was the entire point of the study: Alarm might boost flagging vaccine uptake in kids. (Already, a better study out of the United Kingdom finds no causal link between COVID and diabetes in kids.)

Teenager Vaccination Propaganda

Manufacturing alarm at the very moment an age or other demographic cohort is targeted for vaccination has become a pattern for the CDC. On May 10, 2021, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization for the 12- to 15-year-old cohort to receive the Pfizer vaccine. On June 11, the CDC published a study in MMWR claiming to demonstrate rising hospitalization among this age group; widespread media coverage of the study quickly followed. But the absolute rates for this age group were, in reality, amazingly low: Less than 1.5 per 100,000, which was lower than they had been in the previous December. Meanwhile, a safety signal was being investigated—myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle—which was more common after the second dose, and reported to be as frequent as 1 in 3,000-6,000, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health. Other countries became reluctant to push two doses within the standard 21- to 28-day timeline for these ages. By July, the U.K. had decided against pushing vaccines for this cohort, a decision that was walked back only slowly.

The CDC was undeterred, and in recent weeks the agency’s director has started to push for more doses at these ages. Against the advice of an FDA advisory committee, Rochelle Walensky has moved forward with recommending boosters for 12- to 15-year-olds. This view differs from WHO guidance and that of other countries, including Canada, which is not authorizing boosters for healthy adolescents aged 12-17. But when it comes to vaccination, the CDC has a single policy: All Americans should get three doses, regardless of age or medical conditions.

This is not science as such, but science as political propaganda.

Natural Immunity Unmentionable

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider a final example: the CDC’s near-total dismissal of natural immunity. Many other countries consider recovery from prior infection as a vaccination equivalent or better, an assumption that makes both medical and intuitive sense, but the CDC has steadfastly maintained that everyone needs the same number of vaccinations whether they have recovered from a COVID infection or not. This view is countered by data showing that vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID results in more severe adverse events than vaccinating people who have not had COVID.

In order to bolster the claim that people who have recovered from COVID benefit from vaccination as much as those who never had it, the CDC published a fatally flawed Kentucky-based analysis. The August 2021 study compared people who had contracted COVID twice against those who had it just once, and concluded that those who had it once were more likely to have had vaccination. But the study could have easily missed people who had two documented cases of COVID but might have had severe underlying medical conditions—such as immunosuppression—that predisposed them to multiple bouts of infection in a short period. In addition, people who had COVID once and then got vaccinated might not have sought further testing, believing themselves invulnerable to the virus. The study did not adequately address these biases.

Months later, the CDC published a stronger, cohort study showing clearly that natural immunity was more robust than vaccine-induced immunity in preventing future COVID hospitalizations, and moreover, that people who survived infection were massively protected whether vaccinated or not.

Conclusion: Political Capture of CDC

So why does the supposedly impartial CDC push weak or flawed studies to support the administration’s pandemic policy goals? The cynical answer is that the agency is not in fact impartial (and thus not sufficiently scientific), but captured by the country’s national political system. That answer has become harder to avoid. This is a precarious situation, as it undermines trust in federal agencies and naturally leads to a trust vacuum, in which Americans feel forced to cast about in a confused search for alternative sources of information.

Once that trust is broken, it’s not easily regained. One way out would be to reduce the CDC’s role in deciding policy, even during a pandemic. Expecting the executive agency tasked with conducting the science itself to also help formulate national policy—which must balance both scientific and political concerns and preferences—has proven a failure, because the temptation to produce flawed or misleading analysis is simply too great. In order to firewall policymaking from science, perhaps scientific agency directors shouldn’t be political appointees at all.

Ultimately, science is not a political sport. It is a method to ascertain truth in a chaotic, uncertain universe.

Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics? I hope we choose wisely, but I fear the die is already cast.

Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer.

 

 

Update on the Canadian struggle to recover freedoms is at Daily Wire ‘These Very Powers … Are Why We Are Here’: Canadian Protesters ‘Dig Their Heels In’ Against Trudeau’s Crackdown.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Monday announcement invoking the Emergencies Act to break a weeks-long protest in Ottawa has only served to inspire more resistance, one protest organizer told The Daily Wire.

The Freedom Convoy, a loose coalition of truckers protesting vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions, rolled into Ottawa in late January and has camped downtown since. The protesters have congested parts of the city around Canada’s seat of government on Parliament Hill while demanding a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

So far, Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers, instead employing increasingly hard-nosed political and legal tactics to try and break the protest.

David Paisley says he has been protesting for weeks now and, as a street captain, helps organize protesters and direct those who wish to support the cause with funds, goods, or services. Paisley told The Daily Wire that Trudeau’s announcement, which made headlines across major news organizations in the U.S. and Canada, went off barely noticed by the protesters on the ground.

“No one really cares about any new announcement. I mean the police have been breaking the law long before any emergency power. They were taking our fuel away. They were arresting people for purely having jerry cans or having empty tanks of fuel,” he said.  “They’ve already been doing these ‘emergency powers’ and all it does is make people dig their heels in more,” Paisley added.

“The irony … is that these very powers and threats are why we are here.”

Trudeau announced in a press conference Monday afternoon that he was authorizing the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act, a law passed in the late 1980s to take the place of the War Measures Act. The act strengthens Canadian law enforcements’ ability to fine and imprison violators and ensures the operation of “essential services” such as towing rigs, Trudeau said during his press conference. It also empowers banks and financial institutions to freeze the accounts of any person or business suspected of being involved with an “illegal blockade.”

Paisley said that the protest would continue despite frozen bank accounts or impounded trucks until every protester is cuffed and thrown in prison.

“[The Trudeau government] underestimated the determination and the intelligence of those here, and so everyone still here on the ground, they’re basically willing to give their lives for this – peacefully of course,” Paisley said.

“They’re prepared to drain every last dollar, even from frozen bank accounts,” he added later.

The truckers in Ottawa have received wave after wave of support in the form of cash funds, food, fuel, letters, and even a free laundry service by two ladies who walk Paisley’s street every day collecting clothes. The trucker said he received word on Monday from two men who wanted to deliver hundreds of liters of extra diesel fuel for the convoy.

“You come and sit in the driver’s seat for a few hours and you’ll be able to fill up your wallet again. It’s incredible. People are just handing you fifties, hundreds, packs of hundreds. A friend of mine received a Bible and when he opened it up it had 500 cash inside the bible,” Paisley said.

“The more the government tries to stomp this out, the more and more it causes people to rise up and say ‘this is wrong, and I side with these truckers,’” he said. “These steps from the government have simply hardened the determination of the great men and women down here, so I’m not really concerned at all.

We’ll have lots of new friends when we all get tossed in prison together.”

Footnote

GiveSendGo hacked, donors leaked amid fundraiser for Canadian trucker convoy protest

The Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has been hacked and temporarily disabled after it facilitated the raising of nearly $9 million for the convoy of Canadian truckers who have been protesting vaccine mandates.

The Delaware-based organization, which hosted a crowdfunding effort for the Canadian truckers after crowdfunding site GoFundMe took down their initial fundraiser at the urging of the Canadian government, was disabled Sunday night. Visitors were redirected to the domain GiveSendGone[.]wtf.

The site had raised over $8.7 million in one week after the GoFundMe effort was taken down.

The [hacker’s] statement alleged that those who had contributed to the fundraiser were the same ones who had “helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the U.S.” and had “helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa.”

GiveSendGo’s list of donors, approximately 92,000 of them, was also leaked and shared online.

The site stated on Feb. 10 in response to previous Canadian court efforts to halt the funds that the Canadian government “has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here” and that all the donations “flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”

OK, maybe not so baby faced