Canada, Cops, Wine & Cheese, and more!
Canada, Cops, Wine & Cheese, and more!
This Week at The Pipeline, February 21st, 2022
Hello all, and welcome to the first edition of The Pipeline’s new Substack newsletter!
This week we’ve been all over the situation in Canada, the battle royale between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Freedom Convoy which has descended upon Ottawa to protest that country’s onerous Covid-19 restrictions.
This was the topic of our editor, Michael Walsh’s, weekly column:
From Behind the Unreasoning Mask
Who had the collapse of Canada as a functioning democracy on his bingo card? It was disheartening enough when Australia (with a "conservative" prime minister) fell, and that disarmed and benighted nation quickly transformed from the land of Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee back into the British penal colony it always was.
But Canada? Granted, what became in 1867 the Dominion of Canada was comprised in part by American loyalists who rejected the separation from the motherland in the late 18th century and moved northward. Canadians also rightfully resented American incursions into their territory during the War of 1812 (a war much celebrated in Canada and totally ignored in the United States as the embarrassing mess it was). But since then, Canada has been America's closest ally. Canadians have long distinguished themselves in war, especially during World War I, where their service at Passchendaele, Ypres, and the Somme has become the stuff of military legend. Until the pestiferous arrival of Justin Trudeau as prime minister, no two countries were closer or had a more amicable relationship than Canada and the U.S.
Now, in the blink of an eye, that relationship has been imperiled by Trudeau's abrogation of representative, parliamentary democracy via his mini-Machtergreifung last week.
Tom Finnerty had a helpful post examining the nature of the Emergencies Act, while also calling attention to an act of eco-terrorism which happened in British Columbia while the nation was focused on the goings-on in Ottawa:
An Actual Terrorist Attack in Canada
You might recall the Coastal GasLink pipeline from the Canada-wide, not-exactly-peaceful protests back in 2020, which saw environmental activists blockading roads and train lines, slowing the flow of goods across the country to a crawl, forcing CN Rail to lay off hundreds of workers, and Via Rail to halt their cross country passenger service, seriously inconveniencing nearly 100,000 thousand Canadians who rely on their trains for transportation. (Funny, the Trudeau Government didn't even consider invoking the Emergencies Act against them at the time.) And this was all done in solidarity with indigenous Canadians of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, the vast majority of whom, as we reported at the time, we actually in favor of the pipeline's construction.
Well they've now graduated from "not-exactly-peaceful" to "actively violent." ….
It is hard to believe that this attack had nothing to do with the ongoing situation in Ottawa. Prime Minister Trudeau's decision to invoke the Emergencies Act is currently monopolizing the national conversation. These eco-terrorists no doubt saw this as the perfect opportunity to strike a blow against the pipeline and attract little-to-no negative media attention, thus allowing them to portray themselves as simple peace loving hippies whenever Coastal GasLink gets back into the news.
Finnerty also wrote about a new study which found that ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline, even while the government mandates that gasoline producers blend ethanol into our gas in order to save the environment.
David Solway wrote a scathing evaluation of his country’s prime minister that you’re going to want to read in its entirety.
Who Is Justin Trudeau?
It is now common knowledge that Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, a former part-time high school teacher, snowboard instructor, and two-time university dropout—Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal, failing to complete degrees in either faculty—is not and never was leadership material.
If one studies the checkered history of Canada’s prime ministers from Sir John A. Macdonald to the present moment, one finds the inevitable gallery of eccentrics, short-lived tenants and corrupt operators among them, but none so feckless and inept, so morally impaired and puerile, in short, so unfit for office as the current occupant of 24 Sussex—that is, when he is not sojourning in his Harrington Lake country residence or governing from the Rideau Cottage steps.
And Jack Dunphy touches on the Canadian situation in his piece on the difficulties of police work in our hyper-partisan world:
What Price 'Compliance'?
There was a time when police work was at least somewhat insulated from the whims of fashionable opinion. When called to the scene of an alleged violation of the law, a cop had to answer a few simple questions before taking action: 1) Has the law in fact been broken? 2) If so, can I identify and locate the lawbreaker? 3) Is the public best served by an immediate arrest? If the answer to all three questions was yes, the lawbreaker would be taken in to stand before the bar of justice. If he resisted that effort, it was understood that reasonable force could and should be used to achieve the end.
Today, the decision process is much more complicated. If a cop answers the three questions in the affirmative, he must then ask himself others: 1) What is the ethnicity, political affiliation, or special victim status of the person who has broken the law? 2) What exemptions to the law, official or unofficial, have been granted to persons of this ethnicity, political affiliation, or special victim status? 3) What is the likelihood the lawbreaker will resist arrest? 4) What will be the consequences for me should the lawbreaker resist and I use force against him?
To no one’s surprise, these added considerations have inhibited the police and emboldened criminals, with the expected result of an increase in crime across the country. But this doesn’t mean the police today are spending their time idly. The Covid pandemic has offered some of them opportunities to take risk-free action against people uncloaked with any special "protected" status and the immunities attached thereto, namely, those who resist or even dare to question the state-approved measures concocted to deal with the virus….
What can we make of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s invocation this week of the Emergencies Act in his effort to crush that country’s truckers’ protest? Canadian regulations have demanded Covid vaccines for those entering the country, including truckers, some significant number of whom have objected and noisily brought their grievances to the seat of government in Ottawa. Their protest would seem to be protected speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Trudeau would have it otherwise. The protesters’ views, he says, are “unacceptable.”
One can see the danger here. When a head of state pronounces a given opinion as anathema, there may be an expectation, either implicit or explicit, that his subordinates in the apparatus of that state exert themselves to extinguish any outward displays of the heretical opinion. For police officers, vested with the authority to deny freedom to their fellow citizens, and indeed under certain circumstances to take their very lives, the need for a finely calibrated moral compass cannot be overstated….
In any Western democracy where freedom of speech is guaranteed, a challenge for the police confronting protesters is deciding when—or if—to act when legitimate protest crosses the line into illegality. A police officer may witness a technical violation of the law, but before taking enforcement action he must ask himself, “Then what?”
On a lighter note, our very own acclimatised beauty, Jenny Kennedy, takes some time off from planning her ‘wine and cheese’ birthday bash to deal with the fact that Boris and Carrie Johnson — not her favorite people — are the faces of her Green Jetsetter movement. They’re on her team now, and Jenny is none too pleased.