Historical Parallels

 

The fact that Justin Trudeau and his government want emergency powers in the absence of any real emergency is the surest evidence that they would not use such emergency powers responsibly. The last thing you want to do for anyone who craves power for its own sake is to give them more power. Such cravings are never satisfied. More power will be used to seize more power.

This “emergency” looks like the Reichstag fire. Hitler buffaloed the Reichstag deputies and the public into believing the danger was insurrectionist Communists. This distracted them from the more obvious danger from the sitting Chancellor. They thought, in the end, they could control him, and so surrendered any means to control him. Trudeau has similarly invented a plot by “white supremacists” “waving Nazi flags” to distract from his power grab. Even the guns supposedly found in a farm house near Coutts may be a government plant, as we now believe the Reichstag fire was.

Whether or not this is so, Trudeau has done everything at every step to provoke chaos and to inflame. Beginning with the pointless and unnecessarily provocative vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers—at the very time we were facing a supply-chain crisis, and at the very time other countries were ending all mandates. Insulting the truckers and loudly refusing to recognize their views as legitimate. Threatening their children and their pets. Most recently with having the police go in and break up the peaceful demonstration forcefully. It is as though he and his government have been hoping all along to provoke some violence.

It would be sheer recklessness for the Commons to vote him additional powers, based on this record.

Yet sadly, it has all happened before, following what looks like the very same playbook. In the Weimar Republic. We evidently cannot count on our political class to have the wisdom to stand against this. 

Our hope may be the United States. They still have some time not to follow us down this road. In their midterm elections they may pull back from the same precipice, perhaps in part thanks to the Canadian example. Perhaps thanks to the existence of Donald Trump, who begins to look like a Churchillian figure. The Americans would then be in position, if necessary, to restore freedom in Canada; or, at least, be a home for Canadian refugees fearing the actions of their government.