Justin Trudeau: Despotic Venality Wearing A Crown

Exit Justin Trudeau.

Despotic "venality wearing a crown".

The public inquiry commission came to a merciful end recently and I finally got around to posting about it.

I say mercifully because, if anything came out of this, we were given a glimpse into precisely how this government thinks.

Thinking but not thinking is one way to put it. Or thinking through the lenses of pure cynicism for political expediency.

The government, pretty much, admitted it was political. Like their Covid responses. Which should result in Trudeau never again uttering the phrase accusing others of 'political expediency'. But we know he will. Trudeau adores moments of intimate projection.

When I sat to write about Trudeau's testimony, it was with a focus on his body language and responses. 

Trudeau sat smugly through the proceedings, like someone who understands the system is in place to protect him. Questioning from all sides was polite, gentle, academic, and often inconsequential.

It gives the impression the Commission was minimizing the whole event. We'll see if this is accurate in February.

But as I wrote, it left me wanting. It felt like I was matching his superficiality with my own shallowness.

We all knew he was going to go up there and just follow the strategy that was laid down by his Cabinet predecessors. That is, the Act was necessary because a) police were incompetent and needed help b) fear of violence from lone-wolf agitators and "Pop-up" convoys" c) the 'occupation' was illegal and d) the economic well-being of the country was at stake. Those were the principal reasons guiding their decision - so they say but we'll never know since much of the information was either redacted or could not be reached because of Cabinet privilege and solidarity.

'Member when Trudeau said he was going to be more transparent than Harper? I 'member.

Funny guy that Justin.

We even heard how this was a personal vendetta by Trudeau. Given his enormous fragile ego, this is plausible. After all, he was warned a vaccine mandate for truckers would come with consequences.

I also think the government and the country were taken off guard by the sheer intensity and size of the protest.

In any event, these are the mechanics of what went on. He spent the better part of that morning tediously and at times incoherently explaining the subtle differences between the CSIS Act and other acts including the Emergencies Act and how he basically rendered them, well, 'moot' to the point he could mould it in his image. That is to fit his narrative that the truckers posed a national security threat.  I got the impression he crammed the night before learning about them for his presentation.

He then moved on to spread misinformation and disinformation. Standard fare for the Liberals I reckon.

Misinformation that was designed to promulgate his narrative. One way he did this was to claim American foreign money poured in to fund the convoy. Scary. 

Except it's not true. It was established through evidence and confirmed by GoFundMe and FinTrac that 80% of the source of funds came from Canada. 

He claimed he didn't target the unvaccinated with hate-speech. 

Again. False. The attentive world, including this blog, kept receipts. He absolutely did attack the unvaccinated. 

One of the more bizarre claims of misinformation came from the imaginary tales of hypotheticals when he said the truckers were using children as 'human shields'. He was not pressed to expand on or explain this assertion.

This elicited gasps in the room. Who could blame them?

He lied under oath in other words.

Then came the contradictions. "they were very very clear that they wanted an end to mandates" contradicted his own aides who testified they weren't sure what they wanted which in turn contradicted his statement of"they didn't just want to be heard, they wanted to be obeyed". As if this wasn't confusing enough, the PM said the truckers were aiming their ire at the wrong place since the mandates in place were provincial and not federal. This a preposterous claim and an outright lie since the vaccine mandates at borders are in the jurisdiction of the Federal government. So, while there were some provincial mandates contested, the primary one was to protest the vaccine mandates at the border. The Freedom Convoy expanded it to 'end all the mandates'.

Trudeau also contradicted Chrystia Freeland when she said the Americans were 'very, very worried.' But when asked about President Biden's position, Trudeau said he expressed 'concern' but not more than that.

Which itself contradicts reports that it was the Biden administration who ordered Canada to invoke the act.

Nice people in charge all around.

One little nugget that caught my ears was when he strangely referred to the 'checks and balances' in our government. What, 'checks and balances'? One key branch of government that could act as such, the judiciary, completely rolled over and made clear it was not going to intervene. Besides, our system isn't built on 'checks and balances' like it is in the United States.

I think it would be better to read between the lines of what's going on here. 

What began as a hearing about whether the government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act, morphed into something more after it was clear to an honest and sober mind the government didn't make its case and skating in circles with an incredulous paranoid plot.

Their whole argument rested on hypotheticals and around those hypotheticals came some really bizarre God-complex paternalism.

Say what they want, honking and economic disruptions are not national security threats no matter how hard they try. Let alone having the ignoble audacity to label truckers as 'terrorists' as a bank executive asked to be done and Freeland obliged. 

It led to a secret interpretation of the Act to give itself the power to circulate lists of undesirables opposing government policies to financial institutions thus allowing for their assets to be frozen without due process.

There's nothing 'serene' in this. This should fill those who allowed this to happen to be filled with agitation.

Another moment of realization was this is a government incapable of retrospection or introspection. No one quite grasps the severity of the invoking of the Emergence Act and the mandates that triggered the protests.

This was a moment of outraged singularity to the government remains oblivious to. Indeed, the Ministers and bureaucrats who testified appeared to be, for a lack of a better word, flippant about it all. Cold even. There was too much focus on the mechanics of a policy and not enough on the social impacts and ramifications of how we will be as a free country moving forward.

It's my feeling we're much less free in the post-EA era because of the Orwellian paradoxes Covid allowed the government to create.

Justin Trudeau chilled our commitment to protests as a legitimate means of free expression.

Just as he is doing with our rights to bear arms and free speech.

Finally, I observed they referred to silos and the concern for group think.

Which is ironic because in listening to the three 'comrades' - aides to the PM - it appears to me they created their own silos. They don't appear to be very informed at all about the vaccines. Katy Telford at one point spewed the usual 'we follow the science'. 

Well, that 'science' is all but obliterated now.

In the end, the inquiry did do us a favor in that it was indispensable in that it confirmed our worst suspicions about them. They revealed it in front of our eyes and laid it before our feet.