Emergency Measures

Invoking the former War Measures Act was said to be our prime minister's father's greatest regret when he was prime minister. Back in 1970, it was Quebecois nationalists/separatists, inspired by the words of a visiting French President who, by then, was feeling guilty about his country's exploitation of former colonies Algeria and Vietnam. "Viva le Quebec libre!" said Charles De Gaulle suddenly and unexpectedly to a crowd of jubilant Quebec mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and three years later it's bombs going off and the kidnapping of a high-ranking British trade minister.

So yesterday's War Measures Act is today's somewhat more limited Emergency Measures Act. Quebec nationalists/separatists have been replaced by the modern equivalent of the cowboy: the big rig trucker. Aligning themselves with this non-vaccinated cowboy are opportunists (libertarians, anti-vaxers, frightened white people) endemic to any 19th century cattle drive: those seeking cover, drunk on the expansionist rhetoric of Horace Greeley, an American media figure and radical Republican politician (sound familiar?) who urged Americans to "Go west," only this time the drive took them south, to block U.S. trucks from crossing the Ambassador Bridge into Canada, costing the Canadian economy some $3B in trade.

The Government of Canada is a minority Liberal government, and I wonder if it takes a minority government longer to deploy troops to quash its country's "freedom" fighters than it would if that government were a majority. Three weeks have passed since the cowboys and their opportunists took over the streets and neighbourhoods of the nation's capitol. Yesterday, police removed the blockade on the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor, ON with Detroit, MI. The cowboys are gone, but the opportunists keep sneaking back -- emboldened now, without need of a cover. This was only a test-drive.