If there is a better metaphor for the situation in Canada at the moment than police forces taking an ax to the door of an RV with a “Liber...
If there is a better metaphor for the situation in Canada at the moment than police forces taking an ax to the door of an RV with a “Liberty” sticker on it, I don’t know what it is.
In video that went viral on social media, at least six police officers — two with rifles — broke into the camper, which The Wall Street Journal reported was parked near the edge of the Ottawa Freedom Convoy encampment, one of the last bastions of the coronavirus protest movement that swept the country.
The incident was part of the nationwide crackdown on the demonstrations, a double standard when compared to the reaction to the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” that followed the death of George Floyd.
Video of the raid, part of at least 100 arrests on Friday, shows police breaking the lock on the door of the camper.
Mackenzie Gray of Canada’s CTV later tweeted video of the RV being towed and confiscated.
The Journal reported that a man who had locked himself in the RV was arrested.
According to The Associated Press, Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said police “continue to push forward to take control of our streets” and that they “will work day and night until this is completed.”
The language in the AP’s report on Friday’s crackdown stood in stark contrast to the kind of reporting any establishment outlet churned out on the 2020 George Floyd “protests.”
Consider this paragraph: “The crackdown on the self-styled Freedom Convoy began in the morning, when hundreds of police, some in riot gear and some carrying automatic weapons, descended into the protest zone and began leading demonstrators away in handcuffs through the snowy streets as holdout truckers blared their horns.”
Imagine what would have happened if any outlet called it the “self-styled Black Lives Matter movement” during our summer of discontent. The hue and cry would still be reverberating 18 months later — and the person who wrote those words would be doing hourly work at Target, omitting all mention of his journalistic career from his résumé.
Further adventures in slanted AP reporting: “The capital and its paralyzed streets represented the movement’s last stronghold” in protests that “shook Canada’s reputation for civility, with some blaming America’s influence.”
As for the “paralyzed streets,” again, picture the AP using this kind of language in reports filed from Minneapolis or Kenosha. As for Canadian “civility,” niceness tends to wither at the business end of a gun or a truncheon.
This is pretty much what protesting Canadian truckers have gotten from authorities — particularly after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, which dramatically expanded police powers to quash the protests, earlier this week.
At the time, Trudeau said the Canadian government wasn’t “limiting people’s freedom of speech. We are not limiting freedom of peaceful assembly. We are not preventing people from exercising their right to protest legally. We are reinforcing the principles, values and institutions that keep all Canadians free.”
By, you know, breaking into a protester’s vehicle.
It wasn’t the only ugly reinforcement of the “principles, values and institutions that keep all Canadians free” that could be espied on Friday:
Not that we actually saw all of what went on; Ottawa police tweeted Friday morning that media needed to “keep a distance and stay out of police operations for your safety,” noting that “anyone found within areas undergoing enforcement may be subject to arrest.”
It’s unclear how this is the result of “America’s influence,” given that Canada’s liberals seem to be embracing police brutality and opacity just as liberals south of their border are clamoring to defund the police.
One doesn’t need to take a position on whether there are or were excesses in the Canadian anti-mandate protests to acknowledge that a phalanx of police breaking into an RV because it was inconveniently parked sums up Trudeau’s approach to the Freedom Convoy.
For the left, the right to protest only goes one way — and if those protests involve coronavirus mandates, they need to be stamped out at any cost. One can only hope that in the long run, that cost ends up being the legitimacy of Trudeau’s government.
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