War, And Rumours of War and Frozen Bank Accounts and Horse Tramplings

Some backstory on just how far the Liberals are willing to go and whether they've really gone there, and how far some claims of overreach have gone. Also someone in Germany really doesn't like me.

I’ll be working mostly on Ukraine this week for my columns in the National Post & Ottawa Citizen. There will be a lot of background I’ll post here later in the week on the results of my efforts to slash through the brambles and undergrowth of all the dezinformatsiya making the rounds. For now, sorry to say the skies over Europe are darker than you may think.

In the meantime, the House of Commons has now voted to uphold the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act. The votes went along party lines and the “debates” included both wingnuttery and eloquence from all sides. The Senate debates proceed until Thursday.

If I were to pick a Commons address that properly captures the nuances of invoking Canada’s very own doomsday law it would be this one, from the Conservative MP Michael Chong, who gives the government side its due but comes down on the side of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (as do I, as I’ve confessed elsewhere):

Michael Chong 🇨🇦 @MichaelChongMP

My speech on the Emergencies Act: #cdnpoli

Anyway, the rumours. Let’s start with "a single mom from Chilliwack working a minimum wage job” whose bank account was frozen under the Emergencies Act orders for having merely donated to what is or was either a national white supremacist insurrection or a legitimate if outrageously disruptive protest that should nevertheless not be too casually conflated with the scofflaw hooliganism that attended to it, depending on the lexicon you prefer. This is what the Chilliwack-Hope MP Mark Strahl claimed over the weekend.

I’d reached out to him straight away, asking whether he could somehow provide confirmation of what he’d asserted as fact, which of course would be outrageous if true. Mark got back to me right away, and he said he was trying to verify the claim, which he said had come to him from “a real person” named Briane, but that he was concerned that exposing her to hatred if she were identified publicly (and there is certainly enough hatred going around these days, so fair enough).

Without disclosing confidences let’s just say the despite my skepticism I have cause to believe Briane (if that is her real name) is a real person who made some small donation to the Truckist cause, and that her account appears to have been at least temporarily frozen on the following day or days. But there is no evidence that’s come to me that the two events were related. Strahl appears to have genuinely hoped to have the facts sorted when the banks opened on Monday. I told Strahl to keep me posted. I haven’t heard back, and he doesn’t appear to have spoken directly to any other journalist about this at all, unless I’ve missed it. Gary Mason from the Globe was certainly quite anxious to reach him.

So, unless something else comes up, I’ll have to put this one in the jumping-the-shark file, and I expect Strahl may feel suitably chastened.

This is important stuff, remember. The Trudeau government is effectively resorting to language in the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act in its Emergency Economic Measures Order, gazetted last Tuesday. As the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has pointed out, the Order has been written so broadly that it could apply to anyone who “wants to bring coffee to the protesters” at a public demonstration where the RCMP has deemed that a disturbance of the peace *might* occur.

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 the Toronto Star reports that the moves shut down access to about $7.8 million. And some of those funds may soon be “unfrozen.” The accounts belonged 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. The measures requiring banks to freeze accounts of individuals involved in illegal behavior of the sort anticipated by the Emergencies Act stipulate that such individuals cannot sue the banks. So pow, suddenly you can’t pay your rent or withdraw cash from a bank machine. And the banks “will turn their information over the security services, freeze, their assets?” asks the CCLA’s Noa Mendelsohn Aviv. “There is nothing that I’ve seen so far on my understanding of the orders that limits it.”

The Mounties say they haven’t provided banks with any lists of donors to anything, at least not yet, and the Trudeau government has been saying it doesn’t intend to pick on Aunt Mabel from Moosejaw who got carried away with what she saw as a righteous protest and dispatched $50 by Paypal or whatever. But Keith Wilson, Q.C., a lawyer acting on behalf of the Freedom Convoy, says he’s already representing nine people whose banks accounts have been frozen and whose insurance has been cancelled and none of them were charged with anything and most had no trucks in Ottawa or anywhere else. “The Trudeau gov't is destroying these Canadians because they spoke out.”

Well, we’ll have to wait and see, I suppose. In the meantime, the government is saying “trust us.” The CCLA is challenging the Emergencies Act in court, and informed opinion is divided over whether it was really necessary to invoke the successor to the War Measures Act to help law enforcement authorites in the City of Ottawa get themselves sorted, after having failed to avail themselves of the sections of the Criminal Code that would have allowed them to, say, commandeer tow trucks.

Opinion is divided along similar lines about whether Ottawa police horses “trampled” protesters last Friday. The Ottawa police deny this, and strenuously deny that any protester was killed in any rumpus involving horses or in any circumstance. Fox News is to be thanked for that rumour, and is being rubbished by hoarse approbrium for doing so.

What can be reported with confidence is that horses were involved in an incident in which two people were knocked down and got up and walked away, and one of them now claims to have sustained a serious injury. The Police Special Investigations Unit is now on the case. But holy smokes, the dezinformatsiya.

For merely noticing that the stills and video of the incident offered no evidence of a trampling and asking out loud via Twitter whether there was any unambiguous evidence that “trampling” was a reasonable term to describe the incident, I was tweet-swarmed (is that the term?) like crazy, and out of the blue Twitter informed me that it had rejected a request from someone in Germany to have my account suspended.

Among other inaccuracies in a series of claims made about me personally, sent via a server in Amsterdam to a Wordpress account I’m in the process of disabling, were these: "Terry is a lying coward bitch. You are a modern day Nazi loser pig fucker with the HIV virus in your anal canal." And: "Terry is a liar and a fascist. He might have given AIDS." I am also a "tranny bitch."

Fun times.