The Canada thread

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: The Canada thread

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 14, 2017 7:51 am

Hate Groups Claim To Be Acting As Security For Pam Geller and Ezra Levant Anti-Muslim Event Hosted By Jewish Defence League in Toronto; One Group Promotes Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories

Image


Rabble has published the following:
Pamela Geller just issued a statement on the vandals of Bloc Identitaire found guilty of destroying the building of a mosque in France. The Far-right militants were convicted and received suspended sentences and a major fine for their racist actions against the Muslim community. But Pamela Geller, opens her statement with "Far-right militants? Hardly. These are young people who care about the future of their country." We are approaching the one year anniversary of the horrific killings in a mosque in Quebec. Do we want this kind of hate spewed in our country?

The Jewish Defence League (JDL) has invited Islamophobe propagandist Pamela Geller to speak in an event on December, 18, 2017 at the Canada Christian College in Toronto. She was refused entry in the United Kingdom in 2013 and given her ramped up hatemongering, Canada should deny her entry later this month.

The Groupe de recherche sur l'extrême droite et ses allié-e-s (GREDA) has been leading the charge to keep her out. They have some great information and tools on their website. Send letter, call your MPs and let's show Pam that she has no place in Canada.


http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... ng-as.html
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby conniption » Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:29 am

RT
Fake, woke & authoritarian: Why does Canada continue to take the insultingly insincere Justin Trudeau seriously?
(embedded links & tweets)

Eva Bartlett
9 Oct, 2021
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
Image
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. © AFP / Dave Chan

Canada's pointless prime minister is a vacuous, self-aggrandising, borderline despot incapable of even keeping up the pretence he cares a jot about the people unfortunate enough to be governed by the privileged charlatan.

Just weeks post federal elections, the muppet PM of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has given up all pretense of being a serious politician and instead returned to his norm of idiocy, offensive gaffs, scandals, and increasing the authoritarianism Canadians have endured the past 18+ months (but which Trudeau and other leaders have flouted).

On September 30, the day of Canada's newly-established National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, instead of himself abiding by the words of his (clearly-scripted and hollow) statement, Trudeau skipped off West to hit the waves and walk on the beach with his wife and kids.

The statement included Trudeau inviting Canadians, “to reflect on the painful and lasting impacts of residential schools in Canada, and to honour survivors, their families, and their communities,” and, “to remember the many children who never returned home.”

This he did by ignoring requests of Indigenous communities to visit, instead opting for family fun time in Tofino, a holiday town on Vancouver Island.

This is hardly surprising, given he is merely the face of the government of Canada, the same government which has paid lip service to caring about Indigenous peoples, but continues to allow many communities to boil contaminated water rather than solving the dangerous health issue.

Trudeau's choice to go surfing on the very day of the first year of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, was, in my opinion, him revealing how little he cares for the issues he feigns concern over.

A week later, he donned his pretend-sincere face and uttered the empty words, “Travelling on the 30th was a mistake and I regret it.”

Nah. He doesn't regret it, he regrets getting caught. Or as a survivor of the genocidal ‘residential school’ system said, “this just shows us survivors that he doesn't actually want to meet with us. He's just hoping that we will just disappear into the sunset.”

Last July I wrote of the sudden media attention regarding the horrific issue of the Canada-wide ‘residential schools’, where starvation, torture, and sexual, physical and mental abuse were rife.

In a follow up article, I cited an interview I conducted with Roland Chrisjohn, a PhD-educated clinical psychologist and head of the Native Studies department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, who spoke of Canada's long history of covering up the crimes against Indigenous children imprisoned in the ‘schools’.

Trudeau's latest failure to show any semblance of genuine remorse over these crimes was noted in the backlash on social media, including in response to his virtue-signalling tweet after the fact.

From crass to crazy

More recently, Trudeau took to Twitter tweeting about “lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls,” and adding his own version of inclusivity, 2SLGBTQQIA, that left even the wokest confused, and many mocking his idiocy.

The 2SL of that Trudeauism apparently referred to ‘Two-spirit’, or “a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit and is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.”

Although Team Trudeau thought they were ahead of the woke game, he instead, once again, looked like an idiot in a suit pretending to be a leader. One whose Twitter settings should include parental guidance, for his own good.

Trudeau's authoritarianism

While the PM might garner a tad of sympathy from charitably-minded people who perhaps, mistakenly, think the guy has his heart in the right place but keeps mucking up with his idiotic gaffes, many Canadians are rightly pissed off by his, and Canada's, authoritarian streak over the past two years.

Ontario has had one of the longest and most brutal lockdowns in the world – though the tyranny in Australia has superseded that of Ontario.

Earlier this year, Canada decided to re-invent science and declare that natural immunity to Covid-19 isn't acceptable, only the fast-tracked Big Pharma jabs, meaning that many Canadians, myself-included, cannot return to Canada.

In the leadup to the rushed election, Trudeau said unvaccinated citizens should be banned from planes, trains & buses, and called on the populace to shame and condemn the anti-vaxxers as a “danger.”

This week, Trudeau announced Canadians aged 12 and up will be forced to be jabbed in order to travel.

And Trudeau's government will tighten the noose further, implementing prison-state rules about travel by the end of November: only fully vaccinated Canadians can travel.

This is unsurprising to those who have followed Canada's not so subtle slide towards tyranny. Nor is it surprising after over a year of Covid-19-related psychological operations against the Canadian people, with the intent of “shaping and exploiting” information, discouraging civil disobedience, and boosting confidence in the government's narratives on matters pandemic.

Also on rt.com Canadian military saw Covid-19 pandemic as ‘unique opportunity’ to deploy propaganda on own population – report

Although I believe that whoever the muppet leader of Canada is, the policies would largely be the same, the Trudeau brand is truly repugnant.

Canadians are doomed with years more fake, woke and authoritarian non-leadership, with no imminent solution in sight other than mass civil disobedience. But sadly, the combination of idiotic and distracting identity politics and the media fear mongering will ensure that this does not happen.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/537015-fake-wo ... n-trudeau/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby norton ash » Sun Oct 10, 2021 2:32 pm

All the Canadian political parties, federal and provincial, are in lockstep on the jab-vax pass deluge. Dissent, and you'll be kicked out. I'm sensing a lot of fear behind the statements and smiles. Trudeau especially. They've been told what to do.

Canadian news has been Covid-obsessed to a degree even worse than CNN-MSNBC. I'm so sick of it.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby Handsome B. Wonderful » Sun Oct 10, 2021 5:10 pm

norton ash » Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:32 pm wrote:All the Canadian political parties, federal and provincial, are in lockstep on the jab-vax pass deluge. Dissent, and you'll be kicked out. I'm sensing a lot of fear behind the statements and smiles. Trudeau especially. They've been told what to do.

Canadian news has been Covid-obsessed to a degree even worse than CNN-MSNBC. I'm so sick of it.


He's acting more like a tyrant to me. I didn't vote for someone, I voted against him.
Born we are the same, within the silence, indifference be Thy name
Torn we walk alone, we sleep in silent shades
The grandeur fades, the meaning never known- 'Born' Nevermore
User avatar
Handsome B. Wonderful
 
Posts: 276
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2009 12:36 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby conniption » Sun Oct 24, 2021 8:39 pm

Image

Open Letter to RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki

RCMP National Headquarters
73 Leikin Dr
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R2

October 21, 2021

Dear Commissioner Brenda Lucki:


We respectfully submit this open letter to express our most sincere concerns and resolute stand against the forced coercive medical intervention of Canadians, and against the undue discrimination experienced by those exercising their lawful right to bodily autonomy. We are not against vaccinations, but as law enforcement officers, we cannot in good conscience willingly participate in enforcing mandates that we believe go against the best interests of the people we protect.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As Canadians, our constitutionally-protected freedoms precede the government, and may only be temporarily limited if the majority of evidence justifies such infringements as reasonable, provable, and guided by law. If presented with all available evidence in a court, we firmly believe the government implemented mandates would not hold up under scrutiny.
As experienced investigators, we look past what information is provided and focus on how the information is presented. A proper investigation should be conducted as objectively as possible, and follow the principle that it is better to have questions that cannot be answered than to have answers that cannot be questioned. A complete investigation must include full disclosure of all the facts of the case, even contradictory evidence. Why, then, is there little to no tolerance for free and open debate on this matter? Many credible medical and scientific experts are being censored. Accordingly, we rightly have concerns about “the science” we are being coerced to “follow”.
As representatives of our communities within the RCMP and representatives of the RCMP in our communities, we have never witnessed such division in our country. This sense of “Us versus Them” will be further fueled by having a police force consisting only of “vaccinated” people, while serving communities consisting of “unvaccinated” people, which goes against the community policing model the RCMP has strived to achieve.
As law enforcement officers, we already face higher levels of stress and mental illnesses due to the nature of our work. These have been compounded – considerably – by mandates that we believe are deeply unethical, threatening our livelihood, and dividing society.
As federal employees, what is being done to mitigate this stress? Moreover, what assurances are we given that the injections will not cause short or long-term side effects? What steps will be taken to ensure members are compensated for adverse side effects?
Police officers are expected to preserve the peace, uphold the law, and defend the public interest. We strongly believe that forced and coerced medical treatments undermine all three and, thus, contradict our duties and responsibilities to Canadians. We remain loyal to the Charter and Bill of Rights and ask you to send investigators to collect statements from medical professionals (and other reliable witnesses) who allege they have been silenced – putting lives at risk. Allow us to make this information publicly available to all so the public can scrutinize it and achieve informed consent.

ABOUT US
This letter was created from the collective thoughts, beliefs, and opinions of actively serving police officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) from across the country. We have a wealth of experience which includes, but is not limited to, General Duty, Federal Serious and Organized Crime, School Liaison, Prime Minister Protection Detail, Emergency Response Team, Media Relations, and Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit. We come from various ranks, levels of experience, communities, cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, and vaccination statuses. Together we are the Mounties for Freedom. We are individual police officers who united in the belief that citizens, including federal employees, should not be forced and coerced into taking a medical intervention.

OUR STANCE
In August 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, “Federal public servants need to be fully vaccinated,” and that for those without a medical exemption who choose not to be vaccinated: “There will be consequences”1.
Since that statement, many federal employees have been told they will be sent home without pay for refusing to receive a contested medical treatment. We have united in the belief that people should not be forced or coerced into receiving the current COVID-19 treatments – it should be voluntary. We stand united against the forced and coerced medical intervention of Canadians and against the discrimination faced by those who have exercised their right to bodily autonomy. We believe in democracy, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Bill of Rights.
This is not about whether people should be vaccinated – that is a personal choice.

THE LAW
Our primary duty as peace officers in the RCMP is the preservation of peace2. We have never witnessed the level of division in our country as we currently see from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is our responsibility, now more than ever, to make all efforts at preserving the peace in our country.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) protects fundamental rights and freedoms essential to keeping Canada a free and democratic society3. The Canadian Bill of Rights adds, “… the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge … the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions.4” It continues to say, “Affirming also that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law.5”
We believe our federal and provincial governments have failed to uphold the Charter, Bill of Rights, and Constitution and we are witnessing the erosion of democracy in Canada. As you know, the Charter does not guarantee absolute freedoms. If the government is going to limit freedoms, it must establish the limitations are reasonable given all available facts. The government must adhere to a process to prove their actions are appropriate, called the Oakes test. We firmly believe, if presented with all available evidence in a court, the government implemented mandates would not pass the Oakes test. At the time of writing this letter, the Charter’s section 33 Notwithstanding Clause has not been invoked for this pandemic.
Requiring mandatory COVID-19 treatment options is a slippery slope and allows the government to overstep its authority unchecked. It infringes on the fundamental belief in our society that the individual has the right and freedom to choose. The choice of whether to receive medical treatments has always been an individual’s right in Canada. The Canadian National Report on Immunization (1996) stated “Immunization is not mandatory in Canada; it cannot be made mandatory because of the Canadian Constitution.6” Section 2 of The Charter guarantees these fundamental freedoms through the freedom of conscience (subsection a) and the freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression (subsection b)7. Without individuals having the freedom to choose, we would not have a democratic society.
Though the Nuremberg Code is not a law, it is internationally accepted and falls in line with the spirit of our Charter and Bill of Rights. A key component of the Nuremberg Code is that participants in a medical experiment need to participate voluntarily without any form of force or coercion8. We have obtained documentation from several Canadian doctors who have explained the current COVID-19 treatment options in Canada, being referred to as “vaccines”, were recently authorized as new drugs despite the absence of long-term data9. According to these accredited Canadian doctors, these treatment options did not meet the criteria of true vaccines until very recently when the definition of vaccine was changed10,11. Without long-term data, these vaccines are still experimental. We believe the act of removing the rights and freedoms of citizens who refuse to participate in specific COVID-19 treatment options is a form of coercion.
The Criminal Code contains our country’s Criminal Offences and explains that a person commits an assault by intentionally applying force to someone else without that person’s consent12. The Criminal Code further explains that consent is not obtained from a person who submits, or neglects to resist, on the grounds of authority being exercised over them13. How then can someone give proper consent to a COVID-19 treatment injection when doing so under the threat of losing their job, freedoms, or livelihood? Canadian courts have already ruled that medical treatment without proper informed consent is an assault14.
As law enforcement officers, we cannot in good conscience willingly participate in enforcing mandates that violate the laws of our country and breach the rights and freedoms of the people we protect.

LEST WE FORGET
Each year, on the 11th of November, we remember those who sacrificed their lives for our freedoms. From Flanders Field to Juno Beach, many Canadians have bled and died fighting tyrannical nations. We need to remember past events to prevent the repetition of history’s greatest mistakes.
On the 30th of September, we had the opportunity to reflect on such times during our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Under the direction of the Government of Canada, RCMP members were once issued lawful orders to remove children from their homes and transport them to residential schools. Canada is still recovering from the impact of those decisions and actions. The RCMP has yet to regain the trust of some citizens.
There was a time when scientists believed humans were divided into racial hierarchies and that a person’s intelligence level and characteristics were determined by race15. These beliefs were not heavily contested and were widely accepted as scientific fact16. Phrenology was also widely accepted as being a legitimate scientific study17. These are not examples of science being wrong but of people conducting poor investigations or misunderstanding their findings. These are just two of several historical examples of widely accepted scientific truths, which became ridiculed practices.
We look back at those times of racial hierarchy and wonder how something so wrong could have been so widely accepted as truth. It is just as hard for many people to conceptualize how RCMP officers could have blindly followed lawful orders that devastated so many lives. Yet now we find ourselves in dangerous waters, when RCMP officers are being forced under coercion and duress to participate in actions they believe go against the spirit of Canadian laws.
We find it ironic that an organization that preaches the honour and respect of Canadian values, and the sacrifice of their veterans, would support actions that contradict the values our veterans fought to uphold. Enforcement of identification and checkpoints was an early step in what would become the Holocaust. Canadian citizens of various backgrounds are being segregated and punished for choosing not to disclose a personal medical decision. We cannot think of a more ironic and cruel way for our governments to pay homage to the sacrifices Canadians have made worldwide to protect individual freedoms than by participating in a process that takes those freedoms away.
Today, instead of having one version of scientific “truth” during this pandemic, we have versions that contradict one another. How can some professionals be so certain their interpretation of science is correct when others give evidence to the contrary? History has already demonstrated we get things wrong even when our scientists agree.
We acknowledge there is a spectrum filled with beliefs relating to this pandemic. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to two main schools of thought: the common narrative (those who believe the current COVID-19 treatment injections are the way through the pandemic) and those who have concerns with the COVID-19 treatment injections. It’s important to note we are not discussing “antivaxxers” in this letter. We are discussing people with various vaccination statuses who pose questions about the current COVID-19 treatment options being forced upon them.

THE SCIENCE
RCMP members are not scientists nor healthcare professionals; our profession is law enforcement. We do not pretend to be experts in medical or scientific fields, but we are experienced and professional investigators: we look for the facts. Proper investigations follow simple practices that remain consistent across most fields. These practices include but are not limited to: asking the right questions, following evidence, being aware of how biases may affect results, and allowing the evidence to point to the conclusion – not allowing the conclusion to point to the evidence. Most importantly, a proper investigation should be conducted as objectively as possible and follow the principle that it is better to have questions that cannot be answered than to have answers that cannot be questioned. A complete investigation must include full disclosure of all the facts of the case, even contradictory evidence.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused several scientists and medical professionals to provide us with information they described as “science”, “scientific”, or “facts”. The problem with many of these statements is that the provided information often contradicted another piece of “scientific fact” that an equally qualified professional had produced. This makes it near impossible for the average person to know what to believe and what not to believe.
As experienced investigators, we look past what information is provided and focus on how the information is presented. This allows us some insight into the credibility of the information. Some professionals make definitive statements such as “It’s safe and effective” or “This is the way”, giving little or no explanation of how they reached their conclusion. When the information provided is challenged or questioned, the response often indicates the answer is something that cannot be questioned. The CDC recently changed its definition of immunity and vaccine10,11, allowing the current COVID-19 treatment injections to fit the definition. This is an example of actions taken when you allow your conclusion to point to your evidence.
Other qualified professionals have provided alternate pieces of information during this pandemic. It is not what their results were, but how they arrived at their results that we believe in. These professionals have all been able to articulate their findings quite well and are quick to admit the remaining questions they cannot answer. These professionals (from Canada18 and abroad19) have expressed warnings and concerns with the current COVID-19 treatment options condoned by the governments. Some of these concerns suggest a higher-than-average number of moderate to severe side-effects from the COVID-19 “vaccinations” compared with our traditional vaccinations19. Others have stated the current COVID-19 treatment options are proving to be less effective than initially believed20,21.
We have attached several documents as appendices to this letter which contain information we believe raises reasonable concerns with the current COVID-19 vaccination mandates seen across our country. We encourage you to review the documents and the work each document references thoroughly. Though we understand we have provided a lot of material – which will take time and resources to read – we believe the fact that there is so much evidence opposing the mandatory roll-out of the current COVID-19 treatments is reason enough to take our concerns seriously.
There have also been scientific papers that suggest natural immunity is a better form of protection than what the COVID-19 vaccination can give21-24. Why is antibody testing not being discussed as a potential option for RCMP members?
Here is a list of the documents we’ve attached to this letter. These documents are a sample of what is available and were written by people (or groups) of scientific or medical professionals in fields directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We defer to their expertise.

Appendix A – This is an open letter from Dr. Eric Payne, a pediatric neurologist in Alberta, to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. In his letter, Dr. Payne highlights several inconsistencies he has found with the common narrative. Dr. Payne provides several sources from around the world throughout his letter.
Appendix B – This is the Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration. This heavily sourced document provides information on the current pandemic and makes recommendations based on their findings.
Appendix C – This is a letter from Dr. Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist in Ontario, to the President of the University of Guelph. Dr. Bridle uses his extensive experience and qualifications to explain his concerns with the common narrative surrounding the COVID-19 treatment injections. Dr. Bridle also articulates his concerns with the COVID-19 health mandates.
Appendix D – This is an open letter from Health Professionals United to the Alberta Health Services. The letter outlines reasons why several frontline healthcare workers in Alberta heavily oppose mandatory COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
Appendix E – This is an open letter from frontline healthcare workers in British Columbia to Dr. Bonnie Henry, Adrian Dix, and Premier John Horgan. The author(s) state their experiences and expertise are being ignored and ask that the vaccination mandates be revoked.
Appendix F – This is a report from Dr. Tess Lawrie from the United Kingdom. Dr. Lawrie demonstrates the abnormal number of reported adverse effects from the current COVID-19 treatment injections.
Appendix G – This is a comprehensive report comparing natural immunity to COVID-19 vs Vaccine-Induced Immunity. It was comprised from several scientists from Ontario and British Columbia.

CENSORSHIP
We are not against vaccinations, and we are trying to aid our country through this pandemic. We want to participate in a way that is safe for both our physical and mental well-being. We believe it is essential for people to participate with full informed consent by understanding all the risks of what they are being asked (or in this case forced) to participate in.
As experienced police officers, we have become accustomed to the media portraying us negatively or experienced the media misrepresenting the outcome of a police incident. It would be little to no surprise for us to hear that a media agency misreported an incident. However, it was surprising for us to learn that several of these scientists and doctors, who questioned the information fueling the COVID-19 treatment mandates, also spoke of censorship25-27.
As experienced investigators, we know it is our responsibility to present all available facts to the public – by proxy of the courts. It is not our place to decide what the outcome of an investigation should be. Our job is to collect all available facts so that the public (the courts) can make an informed decision. We have learned from past mistakes that presenting evidence that only supports one side, while ignoring or refusing to acknowledge evidence from another side, is wrong and tarnishes an investigation. We cannot provide evidence from witnesses who agree on one story while ignoring or hiding the witnesses who agree on a different account of an incident.
It would be unthinkable that RCMP members would blatantly disregard witnesses in an investigation to mislead the courts. The investigation would lose all integrity and the members would be criticized. Why then are we allowing this same behaviour to occur by other public figures? There are accredited medical professionals from our own country who are desperately trying to have their findings heard. Instead of allowing these professionals to speak freely and discuss their results publicly, they are being silenced by governing bodies25-27.
Our experience in law enforcement and as investigators have allowed us to see how crucial it is that these professionals be allowed to speak openly and publicly. Without the information being included in discussions, we believe the citizens of Canada (including RCMP members) are not receiving the information they need to make an informed decision. This is contrary to our laws and beliefs, and we do not support it.
These medical professionals have tried to stand up and support their country. We are now standing up and supporting them. They must be allowed to share their information publicly to maintain people’s faith in the government. If the people believe the government is continuing to censor experts, the country will fall into instability. This is common around the world in countries whose tyrannical governments sensor information from their people.

DISCRIMINATION
We strongly oppose the discrimination that has already begun to create segregation in our country. It has divided families, ended friendships, torn apart spouses, and entered the RCMP workplace. We believe the current messaging being put out by our provincial and federal governments is promoting the creation of an in-group referred to as “Vaccinated” and an out-group as “Unvaccinated”. Even worse, the out-group has been labelled “Anti-vaxxers,” a term used out of context in a negative and derogatory way. The messaging from our governments is causing the dehumanization of the “Unvaccinated” group. By dehumanizing the out-group, an institution creates a greater divide between them and the in-group.28
Police agencies across Canada pride themselves in their efforts to hire officers reflective of the communities they serve. This allows community members to relate to their officers and see them as part of the community. We are representatives of our communities within the RCMP and representatives of the RCMP in our communities. Having a police force consisting only of “vaccinated” people while serving communities consisting of “unvaccinated” people will tear down some of the similarities RCMP members share with their communities. This will create a greater sense of “Us versus Them” between communities and police, which contradicts the community policing model the RCMP has strived to achieve for decades. We anticipate that unless this is corrected soon, it will continue to increase the divide in our country.
Dehumanizing individuals is challenging. It is easier to attach a label and stigma to a group. That way, anyone or anything that comes from the group can be written off28. The term “Anti-vaxxer” is currently being used to mislabel and group people into a category to take away their credibility. This has allowed things to be written and said against this group that would be intolerable if written or said about any other group.
On August 26th, 2021, the Toronto Star ran an article that read in large bold letters, “I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds. At this point, who cares. Stick the unvaccinated in a tent outside and tend to them when the staff has time.29,30” If “willfully unvaccinated” was replaced with “Black”, “Gay”, or “willfully Muslim”, this would have been labelled a Hate Crime. How then can we allow such things to be said about people who choose not to receive a medical intervention? Should we allow the same messaging for those who choose not to get a flu shot one season?
The boldness of this statement being printed in a major newspaper shows how acceptable it is in our society to treat people as a lower class of citizens. As RCMP members, we must preserve peace in our communities and put a stop to this.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH
This pandemic has increasingly made people feel isolated from their friends, families, and peers. RCMP members already face higher levels of stress and mental illnesses due to the nature of our work. Members affected by the double-vaccination mandate have faced greater stress and isolation as they have watched their status as citizens and regular members begin to diminish. There is currently insufficient support for these members, and there does not seem to be a plan insight to provide adequate support.
The recent vaccination update has left some people feeling more isolated than ever. In times like this, people need support from a community, and our membership is no different. We fear there are more members afraid to speak up about these recent updates for fear of being targeted. Many members may be trying to stick this out on their own, or worse, suffering in silence. We ask that you attempt to reach out in partnership with the NPF to all members who may be negatively affected by these mandates and let them know their employer and governments support them.
Though most people seem to have little to no side effects from the COVID-19 treatment injections, an abnormal number of moderate to severe adverse reactions have included death31. What assurances are we given that the injections will not cause short or long-term side effects? Studies show that stress and sleep can play a huge factor in whether a vaccine is effective or not32,33. Are you ensuring RCMP members are provided with the appropriate amount of rest before an injection? What steps will the RCMP take to ensure members are compensated for adverse side effects?
We also believe enough evidence has been presented to question whether our governments’ actions in this pandemic are the most appropriate. This is causing moral and ethical stressors for some members as they no longer believe their role as police officers is reflective of the democracy Canada claims to be. Mental health and stress levels will have an impact on how members interact with the public.

PARALLELING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
The RCMP has taught us the importance and severity of domestic violence. Domestic violence is centred around power and control between an abuser and a victim. One of the biggest problems with domestic violence is there is often an escalation in the severity of abuse. RCMP members have been taught how to identify the signs that someone is involved in an abusive relationship. There are different types of abuse the abuser may engage in to keep control over their victim: Physical, Financial, and Emotional.
Emotional abuse is quite complex and will often include a variety of tactics such as socially distancing the victim from friends and family, discrediting the victim so they have difficulty obtaining support from others, and making the victim believe that their thoughts and beliefs are wrong – to the point the victim thinks they must be insane. When it comes to finances, an abuser will withhold money and assets from the victim. This ensures the victim cannot survive without remaining in the abusive relationship with the abuser. When an abuser feels they are losing control over their victim, it is quite common for them to escalate their tactics to maintain control.
The federal government is currently displaying several of those traits with its own employees, including the RCMP34.
Commissioner Lucki, we understand your position is appointed, and we are concerned that you too may be subject to a similar relationship with the Prime Minister. Though you, as our top Mountie, should be impartial, you may be forced into supporting some of these actions out of duress. We ask that you do what we ask our domestic violence victims to do – to take a stand against the abuser. This country needs strong and supportive people in positions of authority. Please show Canadians that the RCMP will remain impartial to political agendas and true to the Charter and our Bill of Rights.

PUBLIC INTEREST
Lastly, we want to draw attention to the public safety issues that will arise if these COVID-19 mandates are upheld.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau once said, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.35” How is it our federal government is now saying it will be mandatory for employees working from home to receive the COVID-19 treatment injections?36
Regardless of their vaccination statuses, there are RCMP members who feel the steps taken by the federal and provincial governments are too extreme and do not have the best interest of Canadian citizens. Forcing these mandates will cause several RCMP officers to lose faith in the federal government’s commitment to the Charter. These RCMP officers will not participate in actions they believe contradict their morals, ethics, and Canadian laws. These RCMP officers believe it is their responsibility to challenge the federal government in court if necessary.
The RCMP, which is already understaffed, will have additional gaps to fill across the country when these members are not working. Communities will have lost healthy and experienced officers, causing a decrease in available resources. There will also be an increase in taxpayers’ spending as the federal government attempts to fill these gaps. Being short-staffed will have a trickle-down effect causing fewer RCMP bodies to be available to properly recruit, assess, and conduct adequate background checks on potential cadets.
Our experience in law enforcement and as investigators have allowed us to see how crucial it is that professionals be allowed to speak openly and publicly. Without including their information in discussions, we believe the citizens of Canada (including RCMP members) are not receiving the information they need to make an informed decision. This is contrary to our laws and beliefs, and we do not support it.
We want to reiterate a point stated earlier in this letter, so it is remembered. If the people believe the government is continuing to censor experts, the country will fall into instability. We are experts in law enforcement and investigations. We are losing faith in the motives of our government, and we will not willingly participate in actions against people whose Charter rights and freedoms are being violated.

CALL TO ACTION
Commissioner Lucki, we ask that you represent the best image of the RCMP by remaining loyal to the Charter and Bill of Rights and not to any particular public figure. Our job as Mounties is to preserve the peace. If we continue down this road of segregation and discrimination, we risk repeating past mistakes. The divide in our society is quickly leaning toward a level of national security. We ask that you open an investigation to ensure no criminal acts were committed in the dissemination of information from federal and provincial health authorities or public figures in positions of trust. We ask you to send investigators to collect statements from medical professionals (and other reliable witnesses) who allege they had been silenced – putting lives at risk. Allow us to make this information publicly available to all so the public can scrutinize it and achieve informed consent. As Canada’s national police force, we are unique in our ability to conduct a large-scale cross-country investigation, which must be transparent to regain trust in the government.
We also ask that you challenge the Federal Government’s decision to send Mounties home without pay for decisions they’ve made on beliefs protected by Canadian laws. Neither the RCMP, nor the communities they serve, can endure the loss of experienced police officers.

We await your response and your plan of action.

Respectfully,

Mounties For Freedom
cc.

The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, President of the Treasury Board of Canada Brian Sauvé, President of the National Police Federation
_______

END NOTES

Connolly, Amanda, “Notice Offering Options for Federal Workers Who Refuse Vaccines Was ‘Erroneous’: Trudeau,” Global News (2021). Accessed September 30, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8118913/cana ... l-workers/.
Government of Canada, “Duties,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. R-10). Accessed October 19, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/act ... age-3.html.
———. “Learn about the Charter,” Accessed October 19, 2021. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csjsjc/rf ... prend.html.
———. “Bill of Rights,” Canadian Bill of Rights (S.C. 1960, c. 44). Accessed October 19, 2021. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/act ... age-1.html.
Ibid.
Public Health Agency of Canada, “Canadian National Report on Immunization – 1996,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20080414131 ... s4b_e.html
Government of Canada, “Guide to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – Section 2,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-herit ... s.html#a2b.
National Institutes of Health, “The Nuremberg Code,” Accessed September 30, 2021, https://history.nih.gov/display/history/Nuremberg+Code.
Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 18, par. 3. Appendix B.
Payne, Eric, “RE: Mandatory mRNA Vaccine Mandate for Alberta Physicians,” (September 14, 2021), p. 1, par 1. Appendix A.
Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, “Immunization: The Basics,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm.
Government of Canada, “Assault,” Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), S. 265 (1)(a). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/act ... lText.html.
———. “Assault,” Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), S. 265 (3)(d). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/act ... lText.html.
Supreme Court of Canada, “Hopp v. Lepp,” 1980 CanLII 14 (SCC), [1980] 2 SCR 192. Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/19 ... lii14.html.
Bryson, Bill, The Body, narrated by Bill Bryson (New York, NY: Random House Audio, 2019), Audible audio ed., 14 hrs., 4 min.
Ibid.
Encyclopedia.com, “Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” Accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/en ... nd-america.
Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 2, par, 1. Appendix B.
Dolan, Mark, and Lawrie, Tess, “16 July 2021,” YouTube, July 16, 2021, Interview, 14:56 min. Accessed on October 19, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgsXVe9IXco&t=2s.
Lawrie, Tess, “RE: Urgent preliminary report of Yellow Card data up to 26th May 2021,” (June 9, 2021), p. 6, par. 4. Appendix F.
Bridle, Byram, “COVID-19 Vaccines and Children: A Scientist’s Guide for Parents,” (June 15, 2021), p. 2, par. 2. Accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.o ... _guide.pdf.
Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “Canadian Covid Care Alliance Declaration,” (September 24, 2021), p. 2-3. Appendix B.
Bridle, Byram, “An Open Letter to the President of the University of Guelph,” (September 17, 2021), p. 2. Appendix C.
Mallard, Bonnie, et al., “Which is better for future COVID-19 prevention: Immunity Following Natural Infection or Vaccine-Induced Immunity?” (October 8, 2021), p. 2, par. 3. Appendix G.
Payne, Eric, “RE: Mandatory mRNA Vaccine Mandate for Alberta Physicians,” (September 14, 2021), p. 1-14. Appendix A.
Dzsurdzsa, Cosmin, “Derek Sloan Hosts Press Conference with Censored Doctors,” True North News. Accessed October 20, https://tnc.news/2021/06/17/derek-sloan ... d-doctors/.
Sloan, Derek, “Censorship in Canada,” Vimeo, June 17, 2021, CPAC Parliamentary Press Conference, 3:15. Accessed on October 20, 2021, https://standupcanada.solutions/censorship-in-canada.
Wilkerson, Isabel, Caste, narrated by Robin Miles (New York, NY: Random House Audio, 2020), Audible audio ed., 14 hrs., 26 min.
Slapinski, Mark, “‘Hate Speech’: The Toronto Star Slammed for Headline Wishing Death on the Unvaccinated,” Toronto 99. Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.toronto99.com/2021/08/26/ha ... accinated/.
Bridle, Byram, “An Open Letter to the President of the University of Guelph,” (September 17, 2021), p. 5. Appendix C.
Dolan, Mark, and Lawrie, Tess, “16 July 2021,” YouTube, July 16, 2021, Interview, 14:56 min. Accessed on October 20, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgsXVe9IXco&t=2s.
Walker, Matthew, Why We Sleep, narrated by Steve West (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2017), Audible audio ed., 13 hrs., 52 min.
Ibid.
Sauvé, Brian, “Members who do not complete an attestation to being fully vaccinated can expect to be put on administrative Leave Without Pay,” National Police Federation (October 7, 2021). Email broadcast to NPF members.
CBC Archives, “Trudeau: There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” CBC News (1967). Accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/omnib ... the-nation.
Johnson, Gail, “Declare Your Covid-19 Vaccination Status,” RCMP NOC News. Email broadcast to RCMP members.


Please add your signature to this Open Letter...

https://mounties4freedom.ca/


Image
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby Elvis » Tue Oct 26, 2021 3:09 pm

I had no idea it had been this bad...


50 years since Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act
Keith Jones
22 October 2020

Fifty years ago this month, on October 16, 1970, Canada’s government—headed by the Liberal Party’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of the country’s current prime minister—invoked the draconian War Measures Act. On the bogus claim Quebec was in a state of “apprehended insurrection,” basic civil liberties were suspended.

In the hours that immediately followed, police carried out raids without warrants across Quebec and took hundreds of people into detention. Many of the detained would be held for weeks without charge.

Image

The vast majority of the detainees had no connection whatsoever to the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ), the tiny Quebec indépendantiste terrorist group that had kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, on October 5 and Quebec’s Labour Minister, Pierre Laporte, five days later.

With the aim of empowering the Canadian state to intimidate, jail and smear the government’s left-wing opponents as violent, the federal and Quebec Liberal governments, Montreal’s Jean Drapeau-led city administration and its police chief spuriously claimed the FLQ kidnappings were the first act in an attempt to overthrow the government.

This provided the legal pretext for invoking the War Measures Act. Enacted at the start of the First World War, the act gave the federal government quasi-dictatorial powers in the event of “war, invasion, or insurrection, real or apprehended.” During World War Two, its powers had been used to intern 22,000 Japanese-Canadians, ban strikes, jail Communist Party leaders and outlaw for the war’s duration the Socialist Workers League, then the Canadian section of the Fourth International.

With the invocation of the War Measures Act, the police gained the power to conduct warrantless raids and arrests and to hold persons without charge, legal counsel or any right to appear before a judge for 21 days. Even after the three-week threshold was reached, those who were charged could be indefinitely denied bail on the government’s say-so.

Denied the right to see a lawyer, many of the detainees did not learn for weeks that they were being held under the dictatorial powers of the War Measures Act. Some were subject to physical and/or psychological abuse.

The 497 people detained under the War Measures Act constituted a diverse group of left-wing opponents of the government—socialists, trade union militants, journalists and anti-poverty activists. They included ordinary working people as well as Michel Chartrand, the head of the Confederation of National Trade Unions’ (CSN/CNTU) Montreal Central Council, the poet Gerald Godin and his partner, the celebrated singer Pauline Julien. The latter two were prominent members of the Parti Québécois, the recently founded pro-Quebec independence party. Its leader, the former provincial Liberal cabinet minister René Lévesque, had repeatedly denounced the FLQ and terrorism.

Only 63 of the 497 were ever charged with any crime. Even more tellingly, just 18 were convicted.

[much more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/1 ... t-o23.html ]


Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for the link, in a brilliant new piece focusing on Canada and Trudeau as examples of authoritarian response to the social consequences of climate change:

Trudeau's spin machine makes a big deal out of his political legacy: he is the son of the legendary Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the PM who gave Canada its own Constitution. But if we're going to discuss the Trudeau legacy, let's not forget that Trudeau the Elder also imposed martial law on Canada, sending the secret police to raid a wide swathe of dissident groups.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Oct 26, 2021 4:20 pm

stickdog99
 
Posts: 6303
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:42 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby norton ash » Tue Oct 26, 2021 5:12 pm

And yet, invoking the War Measures Act is remembered by many Canadians as a gutsy macho move by Trudeau in the face of Red Brigade-style terrorism. As my Dad put it to 8-year-old me, "it's the only way to deal with those assholes." I would say consensus among those who remember is 50-50 on "gross authoritarian over-reach" versus "tough on terrorism." I'd also be willing to wager that most Canadian under-40's don't really know or care about the FLQ crisis.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby conniption » Tue Feb 08, 2022 10:57 am

Oh, Canada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km5Em_xz8RI
(1:03:45 min)

Jordan B Peterson
• Feb 5, 2022 •
This episode was recorded today, February 5th, 2022.

Dr. Julie Ponesse is a philosopher specializing in applied ethics, bioethics, and ancient philosophy. Unfortunately, 20 years in academia came to an end after failing to comply with a vaccine mandate at the University of Western Ontario.

Then, in a video response aimed at 1st-year ethics students, she spelled out her position on forced medical procedures.

Her response went viral.

Dr. Ponesse has since become the Pandemic Ethics Scholar for The Democracy Fund, through which she published My Choice: The Ethical Case Against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates.

'My Choice' book by Dr. Julie Ponesse: https://www.mychoicebook.ca/

The Democracy Fund website: https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/

Dr. Julie Ponesse's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZGk...


~~~

This Is Impossible To Ignore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FBwPjtBMXc
(10:45 min)

Russell Brand
• Feb 4, 2022 •

As Canadian police report no injuries, and 'no incidents of violence', why have the media chosen to smear the Canadian Freedom Convoy?


~~~

Freedom Convoy Preemptive SOS Press Conference Feb.7, 2022 | IrnieracingNews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6fBFdLGUZw
(34:30 min)

Marcel Irnie
Feb.7, 2022 •
Premiered 7 hours ago •

Freedom Convoy SOS CANADA and WORLD. Help us, help everyone. #irnieracingnews #freedomconvoySOS #freedomconvoy #Genevaconvention #warcrimes #policewarcrimes #ApplicationtoProtectingPowersandrelieforganizations

Support Irnieracing News uncensored!
Paypal: http://paypal.me/irnieracing
Etransfer: irnieracing@hotmail.com
AMSOIL Dealer: http://irnieracing.shopAMSOIL.com
Patreon: http://Patreon.com/irnieracing
IG: http://Instagram.com/irnieracing
Telegram Group: https://t.me/irnieracingnews
Apparel: teespring.com/stores/irnieracing
BACKUP YT Channel: http://youtube.com/irnieracingWBM
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby conniption » Wed Feb 09, 2022 5:11 am

RT

First Canadian provinces scrap Covid mandates

Image

9 Feb, 2022
Saskatchewan and Alberta have begun lifting vaccine and mask mandates as the policies can no longer be justified...continues...https://www.rt.com/news/548727-canada-covid-mandates-saskatchewan/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Feb 09, 2022 3:49 pm

https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-the-left ... -truckers/

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

The convoy is despised by those who should support it

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.
stickdog99
 
Posts: 6303
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:42 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Feb 09, 2022 5:51 pm

^^Very well said.

The one thing lacking in that excellent and timely article is any mention of the elephant in the room: COUPVID, the actual pretext for two years of ruling class robbery and oppression. Throughout that time, and practically without exception, these Pfake leftists have all been unquestioning believers in the Official Yarn and enthusiastic supporters of lockdowns, masking, distancing, jabbing, boosting, and the entire neurotic antiscientific rigmarole. That insufferable Nora Loreto person was one of the noisiest among them on Twitler, honking on incessantly about "covidiots" and "tinfoil-hatters" and "conspiracy theorists" and praising herself at length for putting her own poor kids through hell.

Smug professional opinionators like her can only be shamed and embarrassed by the sight of so many people gathered together so fearlessly, showing their faces, breathing freely, laughing and talking aloud, daring to think and act and move without the government's permission and her approval.

Did any of those truckers even go to college? How dare they presume to demand a share in her air!
Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Wed Feb 09, 2022 6:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
User avatar
MacCruiskeen
 
Posts: 10558
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:47 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Feb 09, 2022 5:54 pm

User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby Harvey » Wed Feb 09, 2022 8:42 pm

stickdog99 » Wed Feb 09, 2022 8:49 pm wrote:After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles.


This part is seriously poor analysis in my view. Corbyn got more votes than Blair at the height of Blair's popularity in both 2017 and 2019, despite being the subject of a five year cross media negative PR onslaught. It was actually the 'urban credentialed' managerial classes who bought the anti-Semitism bullshit harder than most. Just as many working class were levered against Corbyn by using the Brexit Macguffin as a meaningful cause. But still, they couldn't put him down. They had to do all that just to narrow the margin enough to steal the election without raising too many eyebrows.

Boris Johnson literally didn't even bother to turn up for the 2019 election. Largely because he already knew the result. IDOX. Halarose. The so called Redwall was nobbled. The majorities were far smaller than the total postal vote in every single 'Redwall' constituency the Tories took. The highest postal vote in history. Halarose was quietly dissolved in the middle of the Christmas holidays then Covid quickly took precedence, relegating the sheer scale of precision engineered election fraud to yesterdays conspiracy fodder. It's all academic now. The electoral commission was quietly dismantled during Covid and Labour is already dead.

As we see, the Right Hand money puppet has hi-jacked Covid scepticism in pretty much the same way as Brexit, rushing to form new media companies and right now sculpting much of the anger to its own purpose as the Left Hand money puppet is busy herding sheep into the meat grinder, making sausage as fast as it can.

Something like that.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
User avatar
Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
Blog: View Blog (20)

Re: The Canada thread

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Feb 09, 2022 10:12 pm

stickdog99 » 10 Feb 2022 05:49 wrote:https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-the-left-betrayed-the-truckers/

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

The convoy is despised by those who should support it

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.


There's alot to unpack in all this.
Joe Hillshoist
 
Posts: 10594
Joined: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:45 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 44 guests