This week, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, for the first time in the law’s history, allowing banks to freeze the accounts of anyone associated with the protests with no need for court orders. Deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland added that the government was expanding rules on ‘terrorist financing’ to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding sites. The vehicle insurance of anyone involved in the protests can also now be suspended, and police have been given new powers to imprison or fine protesters.
As disruptive as some of the truckers’ tactics are – the point of protest, after all, is to cause disruption – this is a remarkably authoritarian move, made by a ‘liberal’ prime minister desperately trying to defend his authoritarian Covid policies. Since then, outcry from the international liberal set has been conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps it isn’t authoritarianism when photogenic centrists do it.
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