Canada: Emergency Law Revoked. Ukraine: Emergency Law Invoked.

I’m not going to be a smartalec and say “I told you so” about the Trudeau government’s about-face on Canada’s Doomsday Law today, but only because yesterday I didn’t exactly tell you I knew, I just suggested here that I reckoned this was happening. And anyway I wasn’t alone in concluding that the governing Liberals knew they had no leg to stand on. And everyone was starting to notice.

At any rate, in its 180-degree turnabout today the government saved itself no end of national and international embarrassment. It was starting to look like the Senate was going to kill it even before the Canadian Civil Liberties Association ‘s court case got the chance to secure a favorable ruling on its case that the government’s usurpation of Emergencies powers was indefensible.

From yesterday’s post on this subject: And now the Finance Ministry may be having second thoughts. While the draconian aspects of the law have not been withdrawn, they’re no longer being used, at least for now. More than 200 accounts were frozen. . . And some of those funds may soon be “unfrozen.” The accounts belonged to holdout truckers and “influencers” of the Ottawa protests, or the occupation of Ottawa, depending on your lexicon. If you care about civil liberties at all you will see it as a good thing if Trudeau or his ministers have decided to back off .

So now they’ve backed off, utterly and completely. Two days ago the CCLA was already saying, okay, even if it was necessary to invoke the successor to the War Measures Act for reasons you won’t candidly disclose, it’s not necessary now. The border barricades came and went without federal Emergencies powers and Ottawa had finally rid itself of its hip reformist police chief and the streets were clearing.

In the Senate debates, the government’s side was reduced to this: Trust us, we know what we’re doing. Asked to produce whatever evidence the government possessed that could be trussed up as a defensible rationale, the response from the government leader in the Upper House, Quebec Senator Marc Gold, was this: “This is a highly factual and contextual question which necessarily relies upon information that may not be shared in the context of our debate. In that regard I think the government is owed a certain degree of deference vis-à-vis the security assessment it has made.”

Well, hold on. Under the Emergencies Act, the government is owed no such deference, and is in fact obliged to provide a Parliamentary committee with any and all intelligence it’s relying on to go with the statutory nuclear option. In a liberal democracy, you can’t declare war measures no matter how narrowly you intend to apply them without at least showing whatever evidence there is that there’s actually a war going on.

And by Monday, the big hairy national crisis had been reduced to getting tow trucks to pull the last of the Truckists’ rigs from the downtown core of the City of Ottawa. One small problem, even with that. Under the Criminal Code Section 129, the police were already empowered to commandeer whatever kind of vehicle or machinery they wanted in order to enforce the law. And if you don’t hop to it, you’ll be looking at up to two years in the slammer.

So enough about all that, for now. In Ukraine, there really is a national emergency going on, of the very worst kind, and while Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were hiding their tails between their Emergencies Act legs, the government in Kyiv invoked its own Emergencies Act, calling up reserve troops and preparing for martial law. Roughly 190,000 Russian troops are on Ukraine’s borders now, with some already entering the Luhansk and Donetsk districts first occupied by Moscow-backed secessionists eight years ago. That’s what I’m on about in the National Post today.

A big thanks, by the way, to my hundreds of subscribers already - I just kicked this thing off earlier this week - especially those of you who have come up with the $5/month that will buy access to the deeper background this project is intended to offer. Thrashing through disinformation and the usual “narratives” is what The Real Story intends to attempt. Speaking of which, as far as Ukraine goes:

One of the surest ways to know that you’ve just heard a line from someone you will never have to take seriously again is when you’re presented with some version of this proposition: While Putin may be a scoundrel, he’s been driven to distraction by something called “NATO encirclement.” Highly recommended: This in-depth analysis by Michael McFaul, former American ambassador to Moscow, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Robert Person.

The thing is, if you give psychopaths like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping an inch, they’ll take a mile. Especially if you welcome their oligarchs and politburo billionaires into polite society and the real estate markets of NATO cities from Vancouver to London (a racket I’ll be exploring soon in The Real Story), and then pretend that your sanctions are effective.

That’s the “rules-based international order” Canada insists on championing, the order that allowed Moscow to steal Transnistria from little Moldova, and then ripped South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. Ukraine was already dismembered in the Russian severing of Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk eight years ago, and the the summits and multilateral accords pile up alongside all the corpses.

You let Bashar Assad cross a chemical-weapons “red line,” as Barack Obama did, and then outsource the work of policing the line to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, as he also did, and what you get is dozens more chemical weapons attacks and barrel bombing runs and Russian air force bombings. And Syria ends up reduced to a hellscape of cities that look a lot like Grozny, the Chechen capital that the Kremlin destroyed 12 years ago.

Inshallah, this is not the fate awaiting Kyiv.

One last thing. You know how Canadians have been setting their hair on fire about sinister foreign interference these past few days?

Here’s a story that went under the radar today. It’s one I intend to follow up on in later editions of The Real Story. It’s a story that’s been going on for years, and should be familiar to anybody who’s been following my work, but particularly familiar to Chinese diaspora democrats and Canada’s intelligence agencies. Ottawa and the Canada-China business lobby don’t want you to know about this. But it’s been exposed by a federal court ruling, in a public courtroom, and Beijing is very upset.

The outfit has worked with a top Canadian scientist, a member of the Ontario legislature and children in the Toronto area. Its name sounds more bureaucratic than menacing.

But the Chinese government’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) is involved in espionage that harms Canada’s interests, a Federal Court judge has affirmed in what appears to be a precedent-setting new ruling.

All to the good. More on all that later.