It is hard to ignore how poorly run Canada has become

 Victor Davis Hanson:

Canada is now governed by absurdism, and it is symptomatic of an ailing Western elite.

Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week invoked martial law to arrest and financially destroy truckers on the charge that their largely peaceful protests are “dismantling the Canadian economy” that had already been dismantled for two years under some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. The trucker “sect,” Trudeau added, is guilty of felonious “unacceptable views.” But his rhetoric still cannot square the circle of demonizing vital workers while conceding he cannot run his country without them.

He has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the law’s 34-year history, even as the highly infectious Omicron variant wanes after spreading natural immunity and yet proving relatively mild in its effects. Trudeau has neither science nor good governance on his side, especially given how civil the protests have been. The truckers, who more or less work in solitary cabs, are better informed about the “science” and are themselves mostly vaccinated.

Whether by accident or intent, the truckers have now become iconic of far larger issues. Their resistance to government vaccination mandates transcends them. And so, they are playing the role of the proverbial straw that may break the back of a once compliant Canadian citizenry, burdened by over two years of masks, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates.

They are Howard Beales yelling, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” or the iconic Tunisian peddler Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation prompted the Arab Spring, or Tank Man who stood erect in Tiananmen as an oncoming tank finally swerved around him. The truckers are saying to the Canadian people, “Watch and we will kindly show you why you always privately suspected that this prime minister and his ilk were frauds.” As in the case of earlier exasperated rebels, we do not know the exact consequences that will follow, only that the leaders who targeted the dissidents will likely end up worse than their targets.

The North American public has endured almost daily nonsensical changes in “follow the science” state edicts, as well as vast asymmetries between those who profited and those who were hurt by the government reactions to the pandemic. On the one hand, Trudeau threatens to use his state powers to ruin financially the protestors and their supporters. On the other hand, the prime minister brags that he participated in the Canadian versions of the BLM protests in summer 2020. Here in the United States, the combined BLM/antifa riots of summer 2020 caused the greatest property damage claims of any riot in U.S. history, around $2 billion. The violence eventually led to over 35 deaths, the torching of a federal courthouse, police precinct, and historic Washington D.C. church, over 1,500 police injuries–and, mysteriously, very few indictments of the some 14,000 people arrested. Is Trudeau’s point to stress that destroying things make protestors more authentically left-wing and thus exempt, while mostly peaceful protests lose deterrence and therefore can be crushed?

The North American Left justifies such asymmetry both in crude terms and in ideological gobbledly-gook. A Trudeau official called the truckers “Trump supporters,” as if that label has any relevance other than to justify the government’s violation of civil liberties. Does Trudeau think a “Trump supporter” necessarily polls worse than a “Trudeau supporter”? The foppish man who in his youth thought it cool to be photographed sporting blackface is quick to demonize a multiethnic and multiracial protest as “racist”?

Left-wing administrations in Toronto and Washington feel that the supposed higher social goals of the antifa and BLM violent protests (that purportedly advance their own political agendas) warrant exemptions of every sort. More than 1,000 U.S. healthcare workers went on record in 2020 justifying street protestors’ flagrant violations of strict COVID-19 lockdowns, at the height of the pre-vaccination pandemic.

We were lectured that curbing any BLM protest might cause mental health problems. Should noncomplying truckers and their boosters try that ruse?

The asymmetric application of punishment depends solely on the degree to which any given violation aids or detracts from left-wing agendas. A postelection Time magazine piece by Molly Ball gave the game away. She bragged how CEOs and plutocrats conspired to modulate the pulse of the Antifa/BLM violence to ensure calm for Joe Biden’s election—and more or less summed up the larger progressive elite impulse (“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”)
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Who is Trudaux going to get to deliver goods in the trucks he is seizing?  He does not say.  But if he thought there was a supply chain problem before the truckers convoy, he can expect it to get even worse now.  The "Trump supporters" Trudeau denigrates are the backbone of the supply chain.  Trudeau's leadership under pressure has been abominable.  Canada can do better.