Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on the Freedom Convoy movement has drawn criticism from the liberal-leaning Economist magazine, which urged the once-darling of the establishment to stop trying to “police thoughts”.
Leading globalist weekly The Economist has warned that Justin Trudeau’s handling of the anti-vaccine mandate trucker protests threatens to destabilise the country.
While the journal, popular among the Davos set, pronounced Trudeau was too slow in sending in the police to break up convoys that shut down “crucial highways” and said that “Canada’s government is right to enforce” vaccine mandates at the border to “slow the spread of a deadly and highly infectious disease,” it also said that “the truckers have every right to express their disagreement.”
Turning their ire upon Trudeau, the elite mag wrote: “A wise government would listen to them and respond politely, taking their complaints seriously and patiently explaining why covid restrictions, though onerous, are necessary for the time being.
“Justin Trudeau has done the opposite. First, he refused to meet them. Then, seizing on the fact that a few of the protesters appear to be bigots, he attempted to put all of them outside the boundaries of reasonable debate by condemning ‘the anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, homophobia and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days’,” it added.
Despite previously hailing Trudeau’s Canada as a “lonely defender” of liberal values and displaying a “reassuringly level-headed” approach to governance, The Economist blasted his government for seeking to impose “two worrying changes to Canada’s already illiberal hate-speech laws” including the possibility of empowering the country’s Human Rights Tribunal to issue fines upon those who use so-called hate speech and allowing individuals to preemptively launch legal complaints against those who they feel may say something hateful in the future.
“These are both terrible ideas. The Economist has long argued that free speech should be restricted only under exceptional circumstances, such as when the speaker intends to incite physical violence,” the magazine wrote.
“Canada’s laws are already more restrictive than this, and the country’s illiberal left would like them to be still more so… The proposed amendments would give illiberal activists legal tools to harass conservative religious folk, traditional feminists and many more besides, simply for holding views that the left finds offensive. Worse, it would allow some to be gagged before they speak.”
“Canada is not yet a rancorous or bitterly divided society. If Mr Trudeau wants to keep it that way, he should stop trying to police Canadians’ thoughts.”
Trudeau’s response to the “Freedom Convoy” has also been criticised by the other end of the political spectrum in Britain, with Brexit leader Nigel Farage writing on Sunday: “I can’t quite believe Trudeau’s behaviour. I knew he was bad, but this is frightening. No better than China.”
Others in Europe have also compared the Trudeau government to Communist China, including Cristian Terhes, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Romania, who told Breitbart London on Sunday that the “tyrannical actions” taken by Trudeau should result in his government being “isolated by the democratic international community”.
“Such scenes are reminiscent of China, whose government he wants to imitate, not to Western democracies,” Terhes said of the forceful policing taken during the clearing of the protest in Ottowa, including the police horse trampling of “peaceful protesters”.
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