Down With the Sickness: Canadian Politics 2022

Esoteric Canadiana from a friend: "I did see one funny post on Facebook tonight: 'Bye Bye Mon Convoy.'"

haha

A conservative Christian FB friend of mine posted a link to some religious "liberate Canada" website yesterday, with this accompanying text:

Pray for Canada! They no longer have freedom, and the dictator infringing on their liberty has clearly chosen the side of evil.

So, Canadian friends — sorry for your freedom, R.I.P. :(

If this means right-wing americans never dare set foot in Canada again, I'm ready to call the convoy a win

So fox is apparently telling their drones that the police tramped someone to death for loving freedom.

Are we the new Venezuela in conservative fantasies?

Yes, including Canadian rightists.

The screengrab of Tucker’s “Canadian-style tyranny” is of course hilarious, but did you know there’s a long, long screed about it? It’s truly bonkers. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-how-long-until-canadian-style-tyranny-comes-to-america

The false story of the woman being trampled to death by a horse was retweeted by Ted Cruz before the original Fox News reporter backtracked on her statement (without deleting her first tweet):

This…is…horrific. https://t.co/2mf6XBfH02

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 19, 2022

The Reports I was given earlier yesterday from sources on the ground that someone may have died at a hospital during the trampling was wrong.👇someone was taken to a hospital with a heart condition -not due to trampling.I want to clarify this again and apologize for any confusion pic.twitter.com/FVC2sTeeZy

— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) February 19, 2022

You could hear that false story spreading through the crowd last night on one the streams.

Kent and Laurier last night: https://photos.app.goo.gl/89Toy1GQ47hThSB2A

And just now: https://photos.app.goo.gl/AQmzFtYFcY3gT5WR9

I had almost given up on it happening.

I am introducing legislation that would temporarily grant asylum to innocent Canadian protesters who are being persecuted by their own government. We cannot be silent as our neighbors to the north are treated so badly. 3/3

— Rep. Yvette Herrell (@RepHerrell) February 19, 2022

lol

can't we just make the asylum permanent?

Looks like it's been officially recorded:

Protestors have put children between police operations and the unlawful protest site.

The children will be brought to a place of safety.

— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) February 18, 2022

Take 'em to a residential school.

Jesus

I mean, taking them somewhere safe seems like the best thing they could do.

Sorry, I got a little too "give em a taste of what they applauded when it was First Nations kids"

Yeah not a single child deserves this.

Apologies, poor taste.

I'm 1000% anti-convoy, of course, but thinking how appropriately surreal it would be if they turned up in the midst of this:

https://www.blogto.com/film/2022/02/handmaids-tale-filming-downtown-toronto/

I'm sure the security would be unbreachable.

Emergencies Act passes Commons vote:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-emergencies-act-vote-1.6359243

My social media experience over the last couple of days: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2022/02/person-who-does-not-live-in-ottawa-sympathizes-with-protesters/

I hadn't known this weirdo Valley MPP actually asked people to flood police phone lines.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/calls-to-arrest-randy-hillier-mpp-after-involvement-ottawa-protest-1.6359028

randy blocked me on twitter which seems to be his standard response to anybody disagreeing

and then there is this: “Conservative senator apologizes for berating Ottawa residents in late-night protest rant”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/senator-michael-macdonald-apology-1.6359573

relieved to learn that this is a different randy hillier than the one who played defence for the penguins in the 80s

Dude got booted from the provincial Cons like 10 seconds into covid. He’s a royal selfish piece of shit.

Jean Charest and Harper-stanning National Post writer Tasha Kheiriddin planning to run for the federal Tory leadership: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1863855/jean-charest-course-direction-parti-conservateur

An "anyone but Pierre" movement seems to be gathering steam among moderate Conservatives.

And while I'd prefer anyone but Poilievre myself, and Charest would be a much more acceptable moderate in ideological terms, I'm amazed he can still have a career in politics after the inquiries into corruption during his Premiership.

Damn, this is cringey

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/opinion-canada-needs-you-mr-charest-1.5790873

Lol, "we need a bilingual pro-environment, pro-trade, pro-universal health care federalist leader but, um, not Trudeau."

Charest is currently a consultant for Huawei on the Meng Wanzhou case and for its 5G network plans in Canada.

That seems like a problem.

I’m idly tracking coverage of Pat King’s bail hearing and can’t get over the fact that the person offering surety is named Kerry Komix.

In his submission to get Pat King released, the defence lawyer mentioned the COVID risk in jail for King is a lot higher than if he were out on bail and in the home of his surety.

I will note one of the goals of the protest was to try and end all COVID restrictions #cdnpoli

— Cormac Mac Sweeney (@cmaconthehill) February 22, 2022

Weirdly, Pat King was referenced during the County Commission meeting I'm covering right now in Tennessee. It's a small world! (Of crazy people.)

I would like more context on that one!

Was distressed to learn that King is a Sault Ste. Marie native like myself :(

...

An important message from the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General pic.twitter.com/GuMoolupXY

— GG Rideau Hall | GG Citadelle (@RideauHall) February 22, 2022

pff. she even got any power now with the queen dead?

So lonely on a limb

what's the scene in Ottawa?

A lot quieter and clearer; we still need to go through police checkpoints when we re-enter the red zone (in which we live) but it's more possible to go in and out than it was on Friday.

And it looks like people were taking the 'Memorandum of Understanding' seriously and jamming the GG's phone line for a couple of weeks now! This was from Feb 4: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/governor-generals-office-inundated-by-protest-supporters-demanding-the-pm-be-fired

little do they know that william lyon mackenzie king gave FDR a secret code that supercedes both the two-line-pass rule and the trapezoid

I would like more context on that one!

So the Pat King reference was to him supposedly winning a court case "proving" that COVID doesn't exist. (Not actually what happened, of course: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-alberta-case/fact-check-alberta-court-case-not-linked-to-lifting-of-covid-19-restrictions-idUSL1N2PE0EX)

This was in yet another public forum at a public meeting full of anti-maskers. Another one of them ended her remarks about the local mask mandate by yelling "Justin Trudeau is a nazi! Go truckers!"

On the plus side, she probably couldn't have named a Canadian prime minister — or a Canadian — six months ago.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-our-shared-reality-and-the-knowledge-that-undergirds-it-is-being/

The blockades that paralyzed Ottawa and various border points have been removed, at least for now. But the blockades are merely the symptom. The disease is disinformation.

We are discovering for ourselves what until now we had observed at secondhand: large numbers of our fellow citizens can be made to believe almost anything...

It was possible for a reasonable person to worry, circa December, 2020, whether the vaccines developed in such relative haste against the coronavirus might pose some risk to human health. Fourteen months and 10 billion safely delivered doses later, it is not. Valid health exceptions are well known and accommodated; unanticipated adverse events are vanishingly rare.

And yet thousands of people were persuaded that vaccines, and vaccine mandates, pose such a monstrous threat to their health or freedom as to justify occupying the national capital and menacing its citizens, in defiance of the law, for weeks on end. Hundreds were willing to risk arrest rather than obey a police order to disperse. This is not normal.

Opposition to vaccine mandates was not by any means the only idea behind the occupation, or the strangest. Protest leaders appear to sincerely believe, inter alia, that vaccines contain RFID chips, that the governor-general can rule by decree, and that Canada has a First Amendment. This is a movement in opposition not merely to vaccines, but to science, authority, expertise of all kinds: in a word, knowledge.

It is really striking to me how different it feels talking about this online now compared to events from 10-15 years ago. When I look at a forum I used to read in the Harper era, I recall that, while I would disagree strongly with people there, the norm was that they would back up their statements with widely recognized credible sources and we could usually agree on a baseline of facts. Now it's overrun with people insisting that a choppy, clearly manipulative video proves a woman was trampled by a horse and the MSM are lying when they say otherwise, that little girls in BC are having their bank accounts frozen by Trudeau's tyranny, that the protests were completely peaceful (even though four people were arrested on conspiracy to murder and 13 on weapons-related charges), never with citations. Or from friends of friends or distant family I keep hearing things about how video evidence proves that Trudeau has openly admitted he pays the media for favourable coverage, that he personally paid Ford $1M and thus all lockdowns and mandates that appear to be under provincial jurisdiction come directly from him (the head of a minority government!), that the protesters did nothing illegal and were just here for hockey and bouncy castles, that a short first-person clip from a pseudonymous Youtuber showing a police officer arresting him is proof that freedom of the press has been repressed. It sometimes feels impossible to even talk to people when their baseline conception of reality seems that distant.

Yeah, and the immediate, out-of-hand dismissal of information from any credible source — the mainstream media, scientific experts, universities, etc. Like, they won't even engage with the information because anything from those sources is automatically suspect. And when you've ruled those out, all you're left with is random YouTubers and disinformation campaigns.