Essays in Idleness

There is quiet along Wellington Street and throughout suburban Ottawa. It is the quiet of death, now that the government has cracked down: arrested some hundreds of people and seized their property through the banks. It was a reasonably polite, “Canadian”-style of police action, by relatively tame thugs. Mostly it consisted of rewriting laws, with vague, undefined Emergency provisions. “Mischief,” and “Counsel to Mischief,” are now the leading crimes; things like axe-wielding masked eco-terrorists at a pipeline site in British Columbia (last Thursday) can, by contrast, be overlooked. The right to protest peacefully against tyrannical government acts has been retroactively withdrawn.

But this does not mean Black Lives Matter, Indian race groups, and environmentalist crazies, may not continue to physically threaten and intimidate the public, for extended periods, blocking traffic, &c. They are, after all, “onside” with the government’s “reset” agenda, and can expect the most favourable treatment from Canada’s bought-off, prostitute media, while they selectively dox the Liberal Party’s ideological opponents.

Justin Trudeau himself is their principal darling. (Or, “Duplicitous Ken Doll,” as an American observer calls him.)

Our provincial and Dominion governments went formally off the rails of settled law in response to the Batflu epidemic, two years ago. They arrogated to themselves powers never previously claimed by our politicians, except in wartime — to regulate the smallest details of everyday life. It began with “two weeks to disable the Constitution and Human Rights,” both here, and under Trump across the border. The “vaccine passports” were merely the latest crass obscenity of this political and bureaucratic class.

I am modestly optimistic about the course of events, however. True, I must expect direct persecution by the Party of the Dictatorship, which is out to settle scores. But the Freedom Convoy sent to the national capital has shown, for the first time in many years, that a substantial number of Canadians will resist.

That a majority cannot cope with freedom, and are likely to squall when exposed to it, I take for granted. Humans have always been “conservative,” in this worst possible sense. But the splendid Canadian reaction to tyranny went beyond what I had hoped for. In particular, many articulate voices have been raised to speak truth — in the dark fever-swamp of lies in which our culture, and by extension our economy, is choking. This will make a huge difference. The sun is distantly shining; and the spring can once again be imagined. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, to filth accumulating in public life.

In 1993, the then-governing “Progressive Conservatives” were reduced from a majority, to two seats in Parliament, and then to extinction at the “federal” level. Men of good will shall be working towards a similar result, at the next general election, in which the Liberals and NDP should be annihilated.