Woke mobs have ripped down statues of the Queen, her ancestor Queen Victoria, and explorer Captain James Cook in Canada.
“Winnipeg: Queen Elizabeth down, Canadian flag down, Warrior flag up,” crowed the Communist Party of Canada on its verified Twitter account, alongside the hashtag #CancelCanadaDay and a picture of an activist trampling the vandalised face of Queen Victoria’s toppled statue.
“This is the state legislature building and not a policeman in sight,” lamented Robert Poll of the Save Our Statues campaign, sharing one of the videos of the large statue of Victoria sitting on a throne being dragged from its plinth. Mob members subsequently took off her head and threw it in a river.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) — roughly equivalent to Britain’s BBC — reports that one man was “shocked… with a stun gun and arrested” during the disorder at the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg — but added that he may not have been a statue-toppler.
“It’s possible the arrested man was angry at those who had pulled the statue down at around 4 p.m. CT,” the broadcaster noted, adding that a police spokesman had indicated that “there may be information forthcoming on Friday.”
The CBC, for its part, described the mob as “largely peaceful”.
In addition to the toppling of the monuments to Queen Elizabeth II — who is head of state in Canada as in a number of Commonwealth realms including the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand — and her illustrious ancestor in Winnipeg, a statue of British explorer Captain James Cook was violently torn down in Victoria, British Columbia, with the metal tearing apart at the knee of one leg and the ankle of another.
The disorder came on Canada Day, or Dominion Day, as First Nations and left-wing activists are airing grievances over what have been wrongly reported as “mass graves” at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.
These were boarding schools typically run by churches, which the Canadian authorities once required native children to attend in an effort to integrate them into the cultural mainstream.
The growing furore over now-unmarked graves — the BBC notes that at least some “Burial plots used to be marked with wooden crosses that crumbled over the years” — has been accompanied by an ongoing spate of church vandalisations and suspicious fires, with many Roman Catholic and Anglican places of worship, some over a century old, having burned to the ground in recent days.