57 Comments

Absolutely au point. DO NOT OBEY. TELL THE TRUTH. VOTE AGAINST THE LIBERAL AUTOCRACY.

Expand full comment
founding

Interesting that Obama (raised by Stalinist wolves) and Trudeau (raised by a Maoist sympathizer) came to power around the same time. Folks shouldn’t be surprised at the damage they both have done to the societies they were taught to hate.

Expand full comment

I believe it is Obama still running the US as its more than apparent that Biden is Missing In Action. Camilla Harris is even further removed from reality and is a mere front for those controlling the US Government Complex.

Expand full comment

Look at what they do to any parent who dares stand up in front of a school board and speak about gender. Cut off. Shut down. 'What you are saying violates people's human rights'. It's deliberate. Certain ideas are off limits.

Expand full comment

Absolutely. These ideologues have no fear that their world view will ever fall out of favour. They are motivated by a zealotry akin to religious crusades.

Expand full comment

But what's the Liberals' long-term plan in all this? It's got to be more than just hold on to power - that wouldn't have been a consideration back in 2016 and it doesn't necessarily explain all the China-pandering even now. And they must know that the state repression powers they're creating now will be available to whichever government succeeds them. I'm not yet convinced it's intentional. Innate stupidity and ideological blindness are still better bets in my mind.

Expand full comment

3 years ago, I would have completely agreed with you. I was reluctant to accept that this administration was focused on fundamental and misguided change. Previous Liberal and Conservative governments may have disagreed on the mechanics but, by and large, they were aligned on the core principles and direction for the country. Under Trudeau, it is no longer your grandfather's Liberal party. I am no longer under any illusion that this group of righteous ideologues doesn't simply want to burn it all down and construct their version of the post-modern state. The evidence is in front of us.

Expand full comment

But if they do that, how will they get re-elected? If they were riding high in the polls I could see the interpretation that people had had enough of democracy and were happy to let the Libs squash the opposition, and re-elect them forever. I know it's a long time to 2025, and the re-election of Donald Trump in the U.S. will give the Libs a huge boost, but still: they suck right now.

Expand full comment

They don’t need to be re-elected right away. They have completed the long march through the institutions. Even when they are out of power, their carefully constructed and stacked administrative state continues to do their bidding until they get back into power and ratchet it up again.

Expand full comment

I cannot disagree in any way with your summation. That, regrettably, is exactly how this will likely play out. The swamp is far too deep.

Expand full comment
Mar 10Liked by Terry Glavin

So many institutions the Liberals have expanded or stacked operate at arms length from the government of the day. The universities, the courts, the tribunals, the media, Statistics Canada, the government scientists, the professional associations… These liberal institutions do not change their stripes with a change in government; they defy conservative governments when they are in power. (Eg Beverly McLachlin admits she thought it would be funny to name her dog Harper, so she could say, “No, Harper! Down, Harper”.) The Liberals probably are not wrong to be confident of owning the permanent bureaucracy, the administrative state, even when they are not in power. That is why they are unafraid to expand it endlessly even on the eve of losing power.

Expand full comment

There might, indeed, be a Canadian Dark State. But it wouldn't take much for a Conservative government to apply some minimal tweaks to, say, Bill 63 to defang a liberal-leaning human rights tribunal and turn its passive-aggressive threats in the other direction. Governments still do have some power.

Expand full comment
author
Mar 13·edited Mar 13Author

I'm going to be annoying and object to your use of the compound adjective "liberal-leaning" here. I get what you mean, and agree with your meaning, but the Trudeau Lberals are not "liberal-leaning" and allowing this construction into the public lexicon lets the establishment consensus get away with debasing our political speech. They're in fact authoritarian-leaning. They're "progressive" with Stalinist characteristics. They're "sunny ways" autocrats.

End of sermon.

Expand full comment

Point well taken. I was really just looking for a family-friendly euphemism to act as a stand-in for what I was really thinking...

Expand full comment

Conservative governments don’t play by Liberal methods, though. They believe in free speech, and so wouldn’t dream of tweaking a law so it could be used against the speech of progressives. Progressive methods are a ratchet that goes in only one direction. By design.

Expand full comment

Would this be an appropriate time to bring up the fact that it was a conservative government that drafted and passed the 'Emergency Act' that has been use to such chilling effect? How many voices are now silenced by the possibility of a power-lusting dictator seizing bank accounts?

Expand full comment
Mar 11Liked by Terry Glavin

Did you miss the court ruling that concluded the Liberals badly abused that Conservative legislation? What they did was shamelessly illegal. No conservative law can stop that kind of progressive over-reach.

Expand full comment

Would this be an appropriate time to bring up the fact that the Trudeau sneak of weasels “tweaked” as in “screwed with that Conservative legislation in a highly questionable manner” and lied their faces off?

Expand full comment

Was the bill written with sloppy loopholes?

Expand full comment

Yes, the Human Rights Commissions have to be de-fanged. As Bruce Pardy says, the HRCs don't protect us from an aggressive state, they allow groups to shaft each other and the individual. All civil / human rights legislation does that I suppose, it creates client groups that make the government more powerful, not less. And HRC decisions are pretty much beyond judicial review by real actual judges.

Expand full comment
Mar 10·edited Mar 10

If it is not intentional then why are all Western Democracies putting in these same laws to silence the people. Why is there mass immigration allowed in all Western Democracies. For context one must consider that it was the CIA who invested and brought forth the internet to which was handed in part to techfirms who are beholdened to those who are now controlling the large tech companies from with in, the CIA. Globalization and the Institutions we trusted have formed an alliance with the Chinese and now want their Model of Public / Private Partenrship where the CCP controls all forms of income through those large Corporate entitites, Banks, Telecommunications, and Internet, along with drug gangs, money laundering to every single form of monetary issuance. They control it all. Hence our once free and democratic nations have found this model much more beneficial to them as the elites. We the people are no longer useful and that is why there is now been brought forth this cultural revolution and wars, to thin out the crowds and silence decent. It has been brought in the same manner they brought forward the revolution in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China. That is not a coincidence, they are copying the Chinese Model. Why does Trudeau hide the truth about the CPP and its infiltration into our Institutions? Its obvious to me but perhaps I am just a conspiracy theorist.

Expand full comment

Bear with me, as I explain this government's objectives within the framework of the 1988 blockbuster "Die Hard":

Remember the original Die Hard, with Bruce Willis taking on bad guys in the Nakatomi Building during a corporate Christmas party?

Do you remember what that movie's "great reveal" was?

It was that the bad guys were only masquerading as ideologically-driven terrorists. They weren't terrorists at all; they were just thieves.

While Hans Gruber and his gang kept the police, the hostages, and even Bruce Willis busy trying to determine their objectives, they were simply using that time to drill into the vault.

That's the Trudeau government. They have us wondering about their stance on this and that, discussing with each other how their incompetence can be so widespread, their agenda so radical, while they're simply taking the nation's wealth and funneling it to their friends through scandalous shady deal after scandalous shady deal. Only when we get too close to the truth do they proactively block our efforts. They prorogue parliament, they call elections, they block investigations and fire witnesses. But only when we get too close.

Trudeau doesn't care abut systemic racism, or who uses which washroom, or greenhouse gasses, or a housing crisis, or international security, or domestic crime, or Canadians' teeth. It's all diversion while he and his cronies rob us blind.

The only difference between the Trudeau government and the Hans Gruber gang is Gruber had a plan. In our case, we have an imbecile who didn't need a plan because we left the vault unlocked for the weekend, and he just happened upon it. It's like Die Hard, but the villain is Zippy the Pinhead. Yow.

That's it. Sorry if it's anticlimactic and not even worthy of a John McTiernan script.

Now where's our John McLean?!

Expand full comment

Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. I believe that applies here. Or, maybe they (very mistakenly) believe they can control the beast they’re creating. Either way, here we are.

Expand full comment

This is a malicious and malevolent sneak of weasels. Ascribing malice is an entirely reasonable choice.

Expand full comment

Precision Strategies, the Washington based consultants hired by the Libs claimed credit for installing an "unpromising" candidate in Jen O'Malley Dillon's article in the PR trade journal "Campaigns and Elections". That marketing smarts are able to hand a couple of college kids the keys to a country is evidence of how far we have drifted from the ideal of the Demos, an informed citizenry controlling their destiny, to a retail politics dominated algorithmically by skilled opinion manipulators with almost infinite insight to what moves us, now with granularity down to almost individual level. We might as well let Amazon pick the government since they are more aware of our preferences than we are.

The Syrians I Airbnb'd with over Christmas said everyone in the ME is aware Iran drives the conflict and also commented that the problem with the brutal Assad regime is that he hasn't a clue about governing and was forced into the position by his brother.

There was every reason to think Justin "still wasn't ready" in 2015 which explains the explosion of consultants needed to fill in since.

Years of living with a substitute teacher shows the limitations of what even very experienced temps are able to accomplish.

Expand full comment

Terrifying brilliant, brilliantly terrifying.

Expand full comment

I'm not just heartbroken. I'm full-on broken. This feels like the end. I don't even know how to respond anymore, as our happy-face dictator continues to erode our freedoms, comforts, and ways of life.

I'm out. The Canada to which my family emigrated in the 1970s, which we helped build, whose armed forces in which I served, which I always defended in word and deed is undone. It's over. I'm not some right-wing wag who defaults to the "system is rigged" narrative whenever an election doesn't go the way I want it to, but I can no longer convince myself our next election will be fair or transparent.

The bad guys have us out-gunned. They're winning. And 30% of Canadians - MILLIONS - are perfectly okay with that. I'm not a "Truckist" but for me the most heartbreaking moment of this heartbreaking eight year nightmare was when it became clear to me that millions of Canadians are fine with the rights of others being quashed because those others' belief systems weren't in ideological lockstep with their own. When it became obvious that for most people, "freedom of speech" extends only to those who say what they want to hear.

Thankfully I have other ciitizenships. I'll be leaving as soon as it's economically viable to do so. Good luck to the rest of you.

Expand full comment

Bingo.

Expand full comment

And thank you for your service.

Expand full comment
Mar 10·edited Mar 11

Reading these comments confirms what I have believed for a long time (at least 8 years) The Canada that I served for 40 years has transformed into a recognizable post national mess that is no longer in the service of the people but a repressive vessel for the amusement and perpetuation of the elites and their lifestyles. I don’t want to play anymore.

Expand full comment

"Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom."

Well said.

Keep up the good work Terry Glavin.

Hold up a light in the darkness.

Expand full comment

Self-censorship is the goal. As someone said, When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people there is liberty.

Objective law has been buried under a mess of slime. hidden accusers, undefined crime, sentencing for think someone might commit a crime in the future? This is not make believe. This is a dictator preparing the ground for gulags, nothing less.

Expand full comment

Justin Trudeau did say on CBC that the country he admired most was China, then tried to soften the remark by saying,"it's because they can turn their economy around on a dime". The last part was a lie.

Trudeau is Xi Jinping's "little potato" in Canada, and Trudeau will attempt to complete our transition to a China-like State. Bill C-63 goes along way toward that end.

The LPC has co-opted all the government agencies especially the SCC. It should be easy from this point on,even if they fall out of Office for a term or two.

We're China's little Puerto Rico, right next door to the USA.

Expand full comment
Mar 10·edited Mar 10

People still misunderstand the purpose of the new "silencing" of the people. We are of no concern to the massive administrative bodies and technological industry that now control all the information. The new AI coming forward is already changing our history as I write and to which is now our new "ministry of truth". They shall tell us what our history was and how they will progress in the future. Those who control the speech and the information, control the world. It is not just Canada but all nations across the West that are pushing these horrific laws through to which we will have no control of our own lives, now, or in the future. Unless the people find a way to communicate outside the internet, we are doomed to the silencing, conformity, and tyranny. They control it all including the financial Institutions and large corporate entities that shall dictate our lives for us. We are now no longer useful, except to serve them or to fight their wars. Unless we conform, we will be punished monitarily and be separated from our ability to support our selves and families. If we speak out of turn or disobey the "silencing" we will be held in contempt as hateful, forced to pay what we could never afford, or be sent to their gulags for reeducation. The Government, administrative bodies, Institutions, global Corporations, and the elite class have become the new form of "democracy". So when you hear them speak of those who are destroying "democracy", they mean those people who disagree or disobey with their dictate. They now form our "democracy". To stay free we must communicate outside their control mechanism to which is the Internet, otherwise we are doomed to be controlled or punished for trying to destroy "democracy". The only way forward is to stand together and create small communities where we aid each other and can communicate in other ways than using the internet.

Expand full comment

The consolidation of control in unprincipled, opportunistic, venal hands is indeed to be feared. But Canadians don’t fear it because they have gone through an enfeebled education system. Everything is perfect in the best of all possible worlds, to cite Dr Pangloss.

Expand full comment
founding

I wish I could heart this article many times.

Expand full comment

Rule number one is, "Don't give an entitled young rich kid a country to play with. He is liable to break it."

Expand full comment

Brilliant work as usual, Terry. I appreciate the link to Timothy Snyder's essay - he's one of my favourite historians and one of my go-to guys for understanding Ukraine. The poor fellow was recently chased out of a classroom at Yale for speaking ill of communist countries. The facts didn't fit the preferred narrative for some folks, it seems.

I have a question I was hoping you could answer. What's your take on Bill C-11? I understand many people have concerns the government is planning to use it - or is using it - to suppress free expression and ideas critical of the government. Reading about the Bill myself, I am not really concerned about that happening. Bill C-63, on the other hand, seems like a real danger to free expression. But maybe I am missing something.

Expand full comment

I have deep respect for Timothy Snyder. Interesting that he was chased out of the classroom for his views on communism. He has very strong views on Trump but I never hear him say anything about Biden. I wonder what his views are on Trudeau?

Expand full comment
founding
Mar 10·edited Mar 11

The Chinese Communist Party better pick up the pace, Hamas et al are starting to win the race in who takes over Canada first.

Expand full comment

Thanks Terry we are listening. Fantastic article...God Bless.

Expand full comment