Far-Left ‘Defund the Police’ Champion Jagmeet Singh Leads Support of Trudeau Protest Crackdown

Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s left-wing NDP Party, emerged over the past week as a strident supporter of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented invocation of emergency powers against peaceful protests – even though he once postured as a supporter of Black Lives Matter and the “Defund the Police” movement.

Singh thundered last week that only a “failure of leadership” kept Canadian authorities from stamping out the Freedom Convoy movement, a series of peaceful protests against coronavirus mandates, long ago:

People were abandoned while governments argued over jurisdiction. People were abandoned because governments did not take the threat of this convoy seriously. And they were abandoned by the police – some of whom have stood with the occupation.

It should never have come to this.

Many people are rightfully concerned that using the Emergencies Act now, will mean a crackdown on protests in the future. This is not a protest. It is not peaceful. The organizers of this illegal occupation have been clear from the beginning. They came here to overthrow a democratically elected government.

Singh threw in a little of his old “Defund the Police” rhetoric, claiming he remains horrified by the “full and brutal power of the police” when it was used against protesters he considers “peaceful” and legitimate, such as “indigenous land defenders, climate change activists, [and] workers fighting for fairness.” 

Since he considers the Freedom Convoy illegitimate – “funded by foreign influence” and “fed on disinformation” – Singh had no problem calling for the kid gloves to come off. He energetically demanded giving Trudeau the emergency powers he requested to smash the movement, while promising he and his party “will be watching” to ensure those powers were not “misused.”

Singh also slammed the police as supposedly untrustworthy to deal with the Freedom Convoy because they were biased toward it, making emergency powers necessary.

“What has become very clear in this crisis is that there needs to be a serious examination of policing in Canada. Occupiers get hugs from police, while Indigenous and racialized people are met with the barrel of a gun. There are several accounts of current and former law enforcement and military members involved in these occupations,” he said.

“We know the situation isn’t over yet,” Singh said on Monday to explain why NDP would vote to maintain Trudeau’s Emergencies Act powers, even after the protesters in Ottawa were forcibly dispersed over the weekend. No Freedom Convoy protests are ongoing at press time, nor were they when Singh led the charge to grant Trudeau emergency powers in Parliament on Monday night.

“We know there are people waiting to know if the emergency order is lifted and will come right back,” he asserted.

The House of Commons went on to vote 185-151 in favor of maintaining the Emergencies Act. Singh reiterated that NDP would withdraw support for the emergency powers once they were no longer necessary.

Singh sang a very different tune when Black Lives Matter was rioting in American cities and calling for police funding to be slashed. Like many Defund the Police advocates in the United States, he favored stripping money from law enforcement and diverting the funds to social programs, including mental health and “anti-racism” programs.

Singh extended the BLM critique to Canadian police, accusing them of “systemic racism” and “brutality” – and to Trudeau, who he said in 2020 was worse at handling the issue of police brutality than former American President Donald Trump.

“[Trudeau] has done less to address police brutality and violence than even [U.S. President Donald] Trump has done. That is shameful,” Singh said at the time, according to the CBC. “What President Trump has done is still insufficient but he at least put forward some rules, some changes around the use of chokeholds.”

In June 2020, he introduced a motion to vigorously address alleged systemic racism in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and consider options to reduce their budget. When lawmaker Alain Therrien of the Bloc Quebecois voted to halt the motion, a furious Singh called Therrien a “racist,” refused to apologize, and got kicked out of the House for the rest of the day.

In 2018, the Toronto Sun noted in the course of critiquing the left-wing extremism of the NDP that Jagmeet Singh’s brother, fellow politician, and campaign manager Gurratan Singh was photographed in the late 2000s marching around with a “F–k the Police” sign. The scandal over these photos grew hot enough for Gurratan Singh to apologize and declare himself “deeply ashamed” of his previous actions.