The Canadian left, now taking the form of the ironically-named “Liberal” party, has taken an authoritarian turn, locking up its opponents, attacking freedom of speech, thought, and conscience, and creating an unjust two-tier legal system. Its only effective opponent is the Conservative Party of Mr. Poilievre.

Liberal authoritarianism was most egregiously displayed in their use of war measures (the Emergencies Act) against peaceful protesters. But that outrage is part of a larger pattern: the Liberal Party has introduced repeated censorship bills and will do so again, and has created a two-tier legal system in which disfavoured but peaceful protesters go to jail while violent leftists and old-fashioned non-political criminals go free.

It now looks as though the Liberals are slightly ahead. This is a complete turnaround from just three months ago, when the Tories had a 20-point lead, caused by a nationalist reaction against President Trump’s 51st state talk, and his on-again-off-again tariffs, and enabled by the resignation of Trudeau and the coronation of the more sober Carney. That massive political turnabout reveals the brittleness of the large lead the Tories had not long ago. Many were simply parking their votes, or their answers to pollsters, with the Tories. Here, from the CBC, is a graph showing a massive spike as Trump took over and Trudeau resigned:

Source: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/.

That spectacular rise in Liberal support speaks of the socially dominant position of the nationalist left in Canadian life. And that social fact points back to the need for a Conservative victory: all the institutions, from the media, to the universities, to police leadership (as opposed to rank-and-file), to a large crowd of NGOs and purported public interest and civil rights organizations, to the legal profession including most importantly the judiciary, are on the left. The only counter-balance can be the elected federal government.

Civil Liberties Problem One: War Measures against Peaceful Protest

The Liberals’ worst offence against civil liberties was the invocation of the Emergencies Act — in other words, war powers — against peaceful protesters (I’ll avoid the often-annoying habit of using inverted commas around ‘Liberal’, as illiberal as that party has become, give that “Liberal” is also a proper name.)

I wrote about the state’s panic at the time, here. Rupa Subramanya wrote with much greater empirical support here. The Liberals’ answer to the largest popular protest in Canadian history was to invoke war measures, without any attempt whatsoever to negotiate (there were negotiations at the municipal level, which emphasizes my point that the federal government could have participated, but refused). War measures were their first and only answer, and those war measures were justified by a blast of cynical and purely instrumental lies about terrorism and insurrection (more, with primary documents, here).

Nor was this just Trudeau’s authoritarianism. On 7 February 2022, Carney anticipated the government’s lies, taking to the pages of The Globe and Mail to urge force against “sedition” and “insurrection.” (Globe article here, but paywalled, reproduced by on X here.) This was just seven days after the start of the protests, and Carney made no suggestion of negotiations. That The Globe carried no contrary views, but went full-on with the “Nazi/racist/hate” propaganda against the Freedom Convoy, speaks of the establishment’s fear and panic in the face of popular protest, and illustrates my point that the Convervatives are the only oppositional party in this election.

Civil Liberties Problem Two: Censorship and Freedom of Speech and Thought

The second major Liberal attack on civil liberties takes the form of repeated censorship bills. The National Post reviews the defects of the most recent “Online Harms” bill C-63 here, but I fear is wrong to say that the era of such attempts at censorship is over. It will be back if Carney is re-elected. The Liberals are determined that the Freedom Convoy and other signs of popular dissent are caused by “misinformation” (always), and that the solution is to tell us what we may think. Christine van Geyn of the Canadian Constitution Foundation puts the case most succinctly on X here.

The Liberals’ “online harms” bill proposed a draconian mechanism whereby anyone could complain of “hate speech” to a non-judicial commission administered by government bureaucrats. The Liberals’ past efforts to appoint obvious antisemites to human rights bodies, and the domination of state institutions by the left, can leave no doubt that the intent was to suppress speech unfriendly to the left.

Civil Liberties Problem Three: Our Two-tier Legal System

The final danger to civil liberties posed by the Liberals is the construction of a two-tiered legal system, where dissent is treated severely, while favoured (usually left-wing) protest and old-fashioned non-political crime are treated with indulgence, when not ignored entirely. This is arguably the most serious civil liberties problem we face, and it is intertwined with those above.

The problem is displayed in sharp relief by the fact that the legal system has come down like a ton of bricks on Chris Barber and Tamara Lich , leaders of the Freedom Convoy, while it has little interest in real violence from Antifa. The contrast is outrageous, and it ought to be unnecessary to say that it does not matter which causes command anyone’s sympathy. Actual violence, as opposed to the campus hurt-feelings kind, is overlooked, while protest threatening to the system faces repression.

The photo on the left below is from an Antifa anti-NATO protest in Montreal in November 2024. The other caused conniptions in the national security apparatus.

Nor is the Montreal protest an exception. On 17 February 2022, the same day that Chris Barber and Tamara Lich were arrested in Ottawa, violent Antifa-style black-bloc fighters in at least platoon strength launched a coordinated multi-directional attack against the Coastal Gas Pipeline worksite in British Columbia. Three years later, there have been no arrests. Few are aware of this large-scale terrorist attack, nor of the subsequent firebombings of police vehicles, as neither the media nor the state have any interest in it. Many among the chattering classes, and among potential supporters of the Liberal Party, will be sympathetic to the attackers’ environmentalist objectives, and for them, the story is uncomfortably off-narrative. One of the best accounts is Lauren Southern’s documentary Pipeline Wars, here.

I’ve written more extensively on our discriminatory legal system and the Coastal Gas attack in the past - links in the footnote.1

Another example is the Indigo bookstore vandalism case, in which there was more vandalism than in the three weeks of the Freedom Convoy, but most charges were dropped, and even the few convictions got discharges. Antisemitic protest has a left-wing colouration, and the fact that many of the accused were professors (you can’t make this stuff up) or other members of the laptop class points to an element of class as well as political discrimination.2

It is easy — depressingly easy — to find more examples of two-tier policing, of police indulging jihadists but arresting journalists, of antisemitic violence minimized, of Freedom Convoy and other populist protesters pursued while leftists are ignored.

Nor is mere negligence always the issue: here is independent journalist Natasha Graham being brutalised by the Montreal Police, to the cheers of jihadists, just two weeks ago:

More here.

The problem is deeply rooted, and while the Conservatives will not be able to solve it at a stroke, the Liberals will make it worse.

A Systemic Problem

The problem of two-tier policing is systemic, and is a part of the same system that produces Liberal censorship bills, and that enabled the Liberals’ use of war powers against working-class protest to pass with only a few harrumphs from the opinionating classes.

The criminal law is complex: the law itself is a federal jurisdiction, but its administration is largely provincial, though the judges are appointed federally. The police are largely municipal, except where they are provincial, or federal (RCMP) but often under provincial contract. Our two-tier legal system cannot therefore be blamed entirely on the federal government, nor can it be rapidly fixed by a new federal government. But a continuation of the old federal government, the government of a party that actively favours the two-tier system, will make things worse. Among other things, the Liberals will continue to infect the system with leftist judges.

The Conservatives’ attitude to our two-tier legal system is diffident, and speaks volumes about the political environment they face. The Tories will condemn fiercely and rightly the release of non-political violent criminals, but have had nothing to say about the vindictive prosecutions of Freedom Convoy protesters, nor even about the large-scale though little-known Coastal Gas attack, or the other problems mentioned above. Of course, it is their job to get elected and to offer the Liberals no points of attack, so they must consider tactical factors. That they are not comfortable complaining about two-tiered political prosecutions points to the constellation of opinion-shaping power surrounding the problem. As I began by observing, the institutions are dominated by the left, and the Conservatives are understandably cautious about getting tarred as “far-right.”

Those tactical considerations reinforce the point that the only way to get any kind of balance of power in this country in the immediate term is to elect a Conservative government. Under the Carney Liberals, the authoritarian left will control both the elected government and the institutions beneath and around it; there will be no separation let alone any balance of powers. Under the Conservatives, the authoritarian left will be at least partly restrained from above.

Civil liberties will improve under the Conservatives - there will at least be no censorship bills - and they are guaranteed to get worse under the soi-disant Liberals. Vote accordingly.

Frank Graves is a well-known political pollster, and I don’t doubt that he accurately surveys the opinions of his sample. The problem is what counts as “disinformation”. In 2022, Graves published a similar “disinformation index” using the COVID lab leak, an explanation now widely thought to be true, as his first example of disinformation. This time, he asks about economic growth, and he is the one who gets his facts wrong, according to the International Monetary Fund statistics below. Graves himself is pushing disinformation.

The exercise is circular: Graves is really measuring skepticism of elite opinion.

He is no doubt correct that conservatives are skeptical of the views of progressive elites, but it is tendentious to call this “disinformation”. Someone in the US Department of Homeland Security defined “mal-information” as information that is true, but off-narrative. This would be a better description of Graves’s “disinformation.”

Grave’s last outing: “Disinformation” in 2022

I went in detail through Graves’ 2022 attempt to measure disinformation here:

Graves’ conclusions were very useful to state institutions, including the Prime Minister’s staff, and were duly cited by state and mainstream media, establishment commentators, and by the “disinformation” industry. But as I argued then, they rely entirely on the establishment’s conception of “disinformation”, starting with the idea that the "lab leak" theory was disinformation: Graves was just measuring dissent.

Graves, it is relevant to note, has a long-standing hostility to conservatives and to populists.

Disinformation in 2024

Graves summarizes his current study, apparently not yet out in full, on X/Twitter here.1 The influential Professor Timothy Caulfield, a well-funded state authority on “disinformation,” retweets Graves’s conclusions with approval (more on Prof. Caulfield from the estimable investigative journalist Andy Lee here; from me here).2

The left-wing cultural magazine CultMtl reports on Graves’s study here, from which I take this screenshot, which accurately cites his language:

As with the earlier lab-leak example, let’s start with the first claim. International Monetary Fund figures on real GDP growth are displayed here (link on chart):

So Canada’s real GDP growth for 2024 is projected to be 1.2%, versus a G7 figure of 1.7%. Much will depend on the phrasing of Graves’ question about growth “lag[ging] well behind the G7 average”. We are certainly well behind the United States, at 2.7%, and it is hardly unreasonable to say that a growth figure 30% lower (1.2% versus 1.7%) than the G7 average is “well behind.” Graves has no basis for large epistemic conclusions about disinformation.

It gets worse if one looks at GDP per capita, which is obviously more relevant to direct experience and hence to popular opinion than national aggregates. Canadian GDP per capita lags badly, and the lag gets noticeably worse in 2015, when the current government took power:

There have been some encouraging headlines recently, and apparently we may expect a rebound in GDP growth, if not in GDP per capita, in future years. But Graves claims to be an empiricist, and cannot base claims about current facts on forward-looking projections.3 The Canadian economy has lagged badly, and anyone who tries to spin a different case could be accused of trafficking in disinformation.

Briefly examining Graves’ three other examples of “disinformation”:

• Vaccine-related deaths concealed: numerous institutions, including the media, medical and state bureaucracies, and the government in power, have invested their credibility in COVID-19 vaccines. There are significant bureaucratic incentives to minimize adverse effects, though it is difficult to know what effect this has had on reporting. This question really asks whether the respondent believes official accounts, and implicitly attributes truth to those accounts.

• The Right to Bear Arms: this is the only unproblematic factual question Graves asks, and of course anyone who said that we have such a right in Canada would be wrong.

• Climate Change Caused by Greenhouse Gases: this is a hypothesis supported by much highly-credentialed opinion, but a hypothesis is not a fact. Again, Graves is measuring conformity.

Graves’ method is to assign a score to poll responses, giving three points for each statement rated “completely” true or false (according to his beliefs), two for each rated “mostly” true/false, and one point for each skipped question. In other words, he is measuring not merely orthodoxy, but the enthusiasm of the respondent’s conformity to orthodoxy. We have come some distance from critical thought.

The Authoritarian Consequences of “Disinformation”

Graves’s “disinformation index” is misleadingly named: it pretends to measure how well-informed (or not) a population is, and by implication their intelligence, but it is really a conformity index.

The accusation of conservative stupidity has a long and it must be admitted distinguished history, going back to Lord Palmerston’s denunciation of “the stupid old Tory party,” and to John Stuart Mill’s later and better-known attack on “the stupid party.” (I once got a peer-reviewed article out of this theme4). The difference today lies in the social direction of the insult: once directed against a ruling aristocracy, it is now directed downward against a disobedient populace. Once anti-elitist, the charge of stupidity has become the weapon of a credentialed state-employed elite, an elite demanding obedience.

Graves's direction is clear, as is that of the entire disinformation industry. And it is a very large state industry, as Matt Taibbi’s Racket has shown:

Racket News

Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know

Introduction by Matt Taibbi…

Read more

3 years ago · 1176 likes · 359 comments · Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, Genève, Matt Orfalea, Matt Taibbi, and The Hunt for Tom Clancy

Graves wants to delegitimize conservative opinion. But if illegitimate or misinformed opinion can be shown to have negative, even catastrophic, social effects (from a deadly virus to democracy in danger to riots in the streets), then why not censor it, or jail those who propagate it, as the British government now does, and as the Trudeau government would like to do with Bill-63?

Indeed, why let the morons vote at all, especially if they are going to vote for the wrong parties, even for “authoritarian” or in Biden’s words “semi-fascist” parties?5 We are one step away from authoritarianism in the name of protecting “our democracy.”

The Kings and Commissars of the past claimed to rule on the basis of superior knowledge. The managerial class of the present has better graphics and a confected appearance of empirical support. Their language has abandoned theology, drawing instead from a newly constructed pseudo-discipline of “disinformation”, but the conclusions haven’t changed much.

Our rights to speak and to think freely are now under threat.

Yesterday was January 6, and here, via the irreplaceable Julie Kelly, President Biden and his repulsive followers celebrate the imprisonment of their political opponents, gleefully counting off arrests, convictions, and years in prison. “Because democracy,” of course.

https://x.com/julie_kelly2/status/1743380898769211594?s=20

The January 6 riot featured some violence, only some of it initiated by protesters, and the only person killed was Ashli Babbit, an unarmed woman shot by a panicked policeman. It has been met with the largest law enforcement operation in history, mostly arresting protesters who wandered around the Capitol for a few minutes.

This is the civil rights outrage of our age. And you don’t have to be on the right to see that: in Chris Hedges’s words, Trump supporters have been subjected to a “judicial lynching.” The contrast to the treatment of leftwing BLM and Antifa protesters during the massive and not “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 is obvious. An unequal administration of justice is not justice.

The Biden Administration is perpetrating a discriminatory and politically motivated abuse of the criminal justice system. The abuse works on two levels: it criminalizes the opposition party, and simultaneously threatens dire consequences to any who might think of joining any future conservative or Republican demonstration.

The criminalization of the Republican Party, and Trump and his MAGA supporters in particular, will help to energize a Democrat base already determined that Trump is a criminal, or a Russian agent, or a racist, or whatever he is today. And the Democrats calculate that it will have some effect on independent, non-political, or poorly informed voters who believe what they hear, or who naively assume that behind all the smoke there must be some fire. Criminalization entrenches a myth, a summary narrative of January 6, with clear good guys and bad guys, voluntarily repeated by the establishment media and losing nothing in the retelling.

The ferocious reaction of the security state to January 6 also serves to warn Republican supporters, normally law-abiding citizens, that they will face years in jail (even before a conviction) and the loss of jobs, homes, savings, friends and family, and any hope of a middle-class life if they so much as show up to demonstrate for the a disapproved cause. The state is one step away from withdrawing security clearances, refusing to hire, or otherwise putting employment restrictions on “insurrectionists.”

Here in Canada, they seized bank accounts. As we now know, the Canadian state jumped eagerly at the slogan of “insurrection”, and had a J6-based narrative of the Freedom Convoy already written even before the Convoy arrived in Ottawa (as I argued from POEC documents here). Those documents show that the government had willing help from the mainstream media in constructing this useful narrative.

Because the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa was completely peaceful, the state has had less success framing Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. The crown’s case in what is now the longest mischief trial in history appears to be falling apart. That it was brought at all points to the need to criminalize opposition.

The Coutts Four — Chris Carbert, Chris Lysak, Anthony Olienick, and Jerry Morin — remain jailed on non-disclosed evidence, although substantial parts of the official story, including the “Diagolon” terrorist group that turned out to be a meme, have been debunked.1 Experienced eyes have questioned the pictures of weapons that were released.2 But the Trudeau government needed violence to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the seizure of citizens’ bank accounts, so they made something up. The mainstream media is letting them get away with it.

The pattern remains the same: established power needs to criminalize populist opposition movements. The same need does not exist where leftwing BLM, Antifa, indigenous, green, or now Palestinian movements are concerned. Parties of the left, like the Democrats and the Liberals, are familiar with demonstrations from the left, which generally push those parties in a direction that they want to go. Real popular opposition meets a different reaction.

This can only happen because elite opinion, dominating the institutions and led by the mainstream media, accepts and even welcomes the repression of populism. The capture of the institutions by the left is having direct consequences for civil liberties.

The estimable Eva Chipiuk, tormentor of the Prime Minister (“When did your government start to become so afraid of your own citizens?”), asked on Twitter what is going on with the Lich/Barber trial, and here is a more fully developed version of my answer, in a form more permanent than Twitter. At bottom, the Lich/Barber trial points to the perils for civil liberties of a left-captured legal system, a left-captured media, and a left-captured intelligentsia.

The evidence against Tamara Lich and Chris Barber is non-existent, in fact exculpatory, and yet the crown continues. None of the crown’s witnesses had contact with Tamara. The prosecution produced evidence of her calling for peaceful protest and respectful conduct toward the police. The only witnesses who had contact with Chris were police officers, with whom Chris cooperated to open emergency lanes. The evidence is nugatory.

Here are eight political and bureaucratic factors that have pushed the crown into this:

1. Ideology: The state is familiar with demonstrations by the left, which are habitual. As the left usually demands in one way or another a larger state, the state does not find leftist demonstrations too disturbing. But demonstrators demanding a smaller and less intrusive state are unfamiliar, and perceived as unnatural, their demands as threatening. The massive and spontaneous popular support for the Freedom Convoy only increased the consternation of the state and the bureaucratic classes, and their determination to prevent a repetition.

2. Stereotypes: Stereotypes about westerners, and about rural and working-class people are strong, especially in government and media. The government went for the easy button: “They’re racist! Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism!” The urban laptop class media followed obediently, their preconceptions reinforced, their eyes averted from contrary evidence.

3. Local Politicians: Hard-left Antifa-adjacent Ottawa politicians (McKenney, Harden, Troster, Fleury) created an outcry against the Convoy, making many subsequently refuted accusations, petering out in microaggressions. These politicians started the $300 million lawfare suit against convoy leaders. They also have substantial influence if not direct control over the local government and therefore the police. Ottawa being a leftwing city — its primary industry being bureaucracy, it could hardly be otherwise — they face little opposition.

4. The Ottawa Police: The Ottawa Police Service beclowned itself during the convoy, and is trying to get back into the good books of those same leftist politicians, who influence their budget and their careers. This accounts for threatening speeches from Assistant Chief Steve Bell, and for the absurd assignment of an experienced homicide detective (!) to investigate Tamara for counseling mischief. Obviously, they want/need a conviction. And yet they show up to trial without notes, and internal records are mysteriously purged, almost as though they might redound to the credit of Chris and Tamara.

5. Crown Prosecutor: The first crown prosecutor, Moiz Karimjee, is politically on the left, is a long-time Liberal contributor,1 has supported using the criminal law to prosecute speech,2 and declared that the Convoy was "at war with the city of Ottawa."3 He attempted with some success to deny bail to Tamara, keeping a peaceful protester in jail for two months, in a system where murderers get bail. He will have approved the cross-Canada warrant for Tamara Lich, on a bail violation charge so thin that it has now been dropped. Such warrants are usually reserved for violent criminals. His conduct was highly irregular.

Karimjee was sufficiently unhinged that he was eventually removed from the case. But a system created, enabled, and failed to control him for the first 18 months of the case. He was allowed to pursue his vendetta by a left-captured legal system, where there are simply no dissenters in the office. The current prosecutors are now stuck with Karimjee’s case. They may want it thrown out on time or procedural grounds, thus avoiding the institutional humiliation of a not-guilty verdict.

6. The Judiciary: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Richard Wagner has called for "all figures of power in the country" to oppose the Freedom Convoy.4 Former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, who did much to form the current judiciary and is still vastly influential, has been similarly outspoken against the Freedom movement, calling it “the ugly side of freedom”.5 Bureaucracies, like other authoritarian systems, operate more on signals than on direct commands: these are signals to the judiciary and to the legal profession as a whole to get on side, or your career is in question. The current judge will need to proceed carefully, or any acquittal or dismissal will be overturned on appeal.

7. The Mainstream Media: All of the institutions named above operate in an environment conditioned by a left-captured mainstream media, massively hostile to, and uncomprehending of, the Freedom movement. The media both motivates and covers for this vindictive prosecution.

8. The Academy: The academy trains the reporters, lawyers, judges and even police officials mentioned above. Academic leftism has left the sociology department, and now owns the law faculties and the journalism schools. Secondly, the academy provides a never-ending stream of putative experts ready to warn against the impending dangers of right-wing extremism. As I document here, some of them feed paranoia directly into the security state, and into the Liberal cabinet, and that was the case during the Freedom Convoy.

No single one of these factors can account for the decision to proceed with this case. Karimjee may be an ideologue, but he could do nothing without the bureaucratic and political system supporting him. No leftist protester would have been pursued with such vindictive enthusiasm. Were the mainstream media to do its job, we would have some account, from a knowledgeable journalist with courthouse sources, of the irregular and politically inflected prosecutorial decision-making that created this outrage. But the mainstream media is hostile to the Freedom Convoy, and does not do its job.

The legal profession and surrounding institutions are in question. Where are all the traditional civil liberties organizations? Pro-bono lawyers came out of the woodwork for Islamic terrorists. The Canadian Bar Association couldn’t shut up about Omar Khadr. Working people from the prairies are not so much to their taste. It was necessary for true civil libertarians to create The Democracy Fund and The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom almost from scratch.

Tamara and Chris have outstanding lawyers, and apparently a tough-minded and independent judge. But to place hope of an acquittal in them is to look to the accidents of personality to remedy the defects of a system. Even if acquitted tomorrow, Tamara and Chris have already faced a process that amounts to a punishment.

The woke left has captured the institutions, and now has the power to jail dissenters. A discriminatory use of the criminal law is one of the characteristics of authoritarian regimes. This regime has deep institutional roots.

1. Chris Carbert, one of the Coutts Four accused of conspiracy to murder police officers during the Coutts border blockade, was again denied bail after two years in remand, despite the fact that some of the evidence against him is now known to be false;

2. Tamara Lich reappeared on social media, having been banned under bail conditions for almost two years, reminding us once again of the state’s vindictive response to the Freedom Convoy; and

3. Professor Stephanie Carvin of Carleton University and two other security state academics, Leah West and Jessica Davis, published in The Globe and Mail a wonkish critique of Canada’s foreign intelligence policy.1

These three events, simultaneous by happenstance, illustrate something of the nature of power in our society: right wing or populist activists go to jail, while far left activists, even those with ties to violent movements, get tenure, publish in the paper of record, and hobnob with power.

Chris Carbert, the Coutts4, and the Dialogon Conspiracy Theory

Chris Carbert and three others were arrested at the time of the invocation of the Emergencies Act. The allegation of violent extremism was used to justify the Emergencies Act, notwithstanding that the Coutts Four were arrested under ordinary criminal law. There was no coordination or contact between the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and the Coutts blockade in Alberta, but they shared an aim, and the state was pleased to smear the former with crimes alleged of the latter.

Details of the evidence against Carbert are under a publication ban, but at the time of his arrest, the press carried an alarming picture of a table covered with weapons. Carbert and his associates were accused of belonging to a terrorist group called “Diagolon.” Retired Toronto Police detective Donald Best has raised serious questions about the handling of the evidence against Carbert and the other three accused.2 His experienced eye sees evidentiary problems with the much reprinted photo of weapons, most of which are legal long guns.

Anyone with a modicum of skepticism knew that Diagolon was a meme, not a terrorist group. It has since emerged, thanks to the journalism of Caryma Sa’d and Elisa Hategan, that the then state-funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network constructed and circulated the conspiracy theory that the “Diagolon” meme was really a violent militia led by an ex-soldier named Jeremy MacKenzie.3 MacKenzie is an excellent speaker who, very unusually for an accused terrorist, is also hilarious. His account of Diagolon is here: https://rumble.com/v27s7be-welcome-to-diagolon.html.

The Diagolon conspiracy theory, now comprehensively destroyed, was the only element of the government’s Emergencies Act justification that involved terrorism or violent extremism. And Carbert and the Coutts Four were all working men with good jobs and solid employment histories, and no history of crime or extremism. This doesn’t disprove the charges, but it does make them improbable, and raises the question of the denial of bail. In Canada, almost everyone gets bail, except apparently critics of the regime.

Tamara Lich and Freedom Convoy Trial

Tamara Lich, better known than the Coutts Four, was also several times denied bail, arrested at one point on a cross-Canada warrant (on a charge now dropped), and banned from social media for almost two years. The ongoing trial of Lich and Chris Barber, the longest mischief trial in history, has produced numerous videos of the two calling for peaceful protest and for respectful conduct toward the police. And that is the prosecution’s evidence.

The case would have been dropped long ago were the accused leftwing protesters, or anyone other than Freedom Convoy leaders. It is an obvious attempt to criminalize the Freedom Convoy.

Prof. Carvin and the Need for Right Wing Extremism

Which brings us to Prof. Carvin, a former CSIS (Canadian Security and Intelligence Service) analyst, and now a professor of international affairs with a focus on national security and intelligence. She has built a career on finding rightwing extremists, and is quoted in Public Order Emergencies Commission (Rouleau Inquiry) documents telling senior Liberals that the Freedom Convoy was, “the work of organized Violent Right Wing Extremists.”4

The “RG” here is Ralph Goodale, former Public Safety Minister and now High Commissioner in London, writing to Dominic Leblanc, then Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. The unintroduced mention of “Stefanie Carvin” (sic) suggests that her name was familiar to cabinet ministers. The capitalized “Violent Right Wing Extremists,” sounds like a misremembered attempt at “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism”, security agencies’ internal term of art.

Carvin was obviously telling the Liberal government what it wanted to hear. It was a point reiterated by permanent security state officials like National Security and Intelligence Advisor Jody Thomas.5 Professor Carvin had since published an essay blaming the Freedom Convoy (viewed as an event requiring blame) on right wing extremists, reiterating the line she fed to the cabinet.6

Carvin is also close to Antifa, relying on them for research assistance,7 and reposting tweets from Antifa-connected individuals with obvious approval. Below, “Tony” is well known in that corner of X/Twitter, the three oblique arrows are an Antifa symbol, and the ever-present allegation of “white nationalism” is repeated.

Nor is Carvin alone. Her co-author, law Professor and former CAF officer Leah West, has tweeted in support of Antifa protests near Atlanta, characterizing the violence as “dissent,” and has called for the Coutts Four to be charged with terrorism offences.8 The third co-author, Jessica Davis, runs a consulting company professing expertise in terrorism, and has called for the wider use of anti-terrorism laws and tactics against among others critics of Islam and opponents of gender ideology.9 There is a pattern here: an indulgence toward leftwing violence, and a desire to use the security state and anti-terrorism laws originally intended for use against Al-Qaeda and other terrorists against conservative and populist dissent.

Carvin, a former CSIS analyst, is also a prominent commentator in the mainstream media on issues related to terrorism, intelligence and the Freedom Convoy. The adjacency of those topics in the mind of the establishment is of course the problem. The idea that tens or hundreds of thousands would protest government overreach of their own accord, without being manipulated by nefarious actors, and without large elements of false consciousness, will not fit into their minds. It would require a serious rethink of the establishment worldview: a conspiracy of rightwing extremists avoids that effort. Aside from being more ideologically congenial, it has the pleasant side-effect of creating a sense of threat, in turn justifying the security state and an associated cottage industry of academics and consultants.

One Degree of Separation between Antifa and the Security State

There is now one degree of separation between Antifa and the academy, the security state and the Liberal cabinet. It has long been commonplace that academics should play at the politics of the extreme left, perhaps getting arrested at the odd demonstration. But these are not professors of English or gender theory: these professors teach the next generation of security state bureaucrats, have access to the pages of elite newspapers, take part in policy debates whose very wonkishness emphasizes their establishment character, and are treated as authoritative by Liberal Cabinet ministers.

A number of actors have shaped the narrative of the Freedom Convoy and associated protests: Cabinet ministers, professors, security state officials, consultants, lawyers, and state-funded activists, including the admirers of Antifa. The proverbial long march through the institutions has ended in the security state, which is to say in agencies with the power to imprison people they don’t like.

Discriminatory Use of the Law a Threat to Civil Liberties

The state was truly frightened by the size and spontaneity of the Freedom Convoy. The government needed to find “organized Violent Right Wing Extremists.” Security state intellectuals certified the allegation of violent extremism, even as actual leaders like Lich and Barber called for peaceful protest. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a group of state-funded Antifa-adjacent activists, came up with a suspect, however improbable. And the media, which in days of yore functioned as a check on the abuses of the security state, dislikes populism so much that it recycles state propaganda in the news pages, and allows obedient academics to hold forth on the op-ed page.

As a direct result of this discourse of extremism, there has been a discriminatory misuse of the criminal law against popular protesters: Tamara Lich jailed, until last week banned from the internet, and along with Chris Barber still facing a trial and a possible prison sentence. Chris Carbert and three other men are imprisoned already, and still denied bail nearly two years after their arrests, notwithstanding the refutation of a central part of the charge.

The leftist takeover of the security state has shown itself to be a direct threat to our civil liberties. Nor is this merely a function of the current Liberal government (but that too). The academy, permanent officialdom, an alphabet soup of agencies, and the mainstream media are also parts of the problem. The government can fire a person: it is more difficult to fire a culture, an institution, or an ideology. This will be a challenge for any future Conservative government, in the event that such a government should actually try to be conservative.

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The Tamara Lich/Chris Barber trial shows an immense quantity of police and prosecutorial resources deployed against two peaceful protesters, guilty at most of counseling parking violations embarrassing to progressive elites.

Few know that on exactly the same day — 17 Feb 2022 — that Tamara Lich was arrested there was a real terrorist attack on the Coastal GasLink work site in British Columbia. Three days earlier the Emergencies Act had been invoked, justified by a torrent of rhetoric about violent extremism. This did not prevent anarchists, i.e. Antifa, from launching a highly-coordinated attack in approximately platoon strength on Coastal GasLink.

This is the Emergencies Act: highly effective against workers and business owners, not so much against real terrorists.

No arrests have been made in the Coastal GasLink attack, though the RCMP unit investigating has subsequently itself been the subject of further firebomb attacks. (see video below).

I do not doubt that the RCMP on the ground in BC are doing their best to find the Coastal GasLink terrorists. But the politicians and the bureaucratic state, including the upper reaches of the security services, are not too upset with environmental protest, with whose aims they sympathize.

It's two working-class people from Medicine Hat and Swift Current, who wanted the bureaucratic state to meddle a little bit less, who really embarrassed them.

Under anarcho-tyranny, the enforcement of the law is selective and instrumental, and primarily focused upon the enemies of the powerful. That is why Tamara went to jail, and Antifa terrorists are still at large.

A CBC report:

Stills - the original attack on the Coastal GasLink worksite:

The later firebomb attack on RCMP vehicles:

https://twitter.com/mfproudman/status/1701065745570918499

Commenting on the Tamara Lich/Chris Barber trial, David Moscrop, writing in the Globe and Mail, asserts that the Freedom Convoy "terrorized" residents of Ottawa, and "did try to overthrow the government.”

I am one of those residents (living downtown, on a street mentioned as unlivable in the POEC inquiry). The contrast between the hysterics of the MSM and the joyful reality in the streets was striking, and also a scandal.

Aside from the much-discussed MOU of James Bauder, with which Tamara and Chris had nothing to do, Moscrop's evidence for the "overthrow" assertion is a set of now discredited statements about coups and violence made by Trudeau's National Security and Intelligence Advisor Jody Thomas.

This is the woman who could not get reports of Chinese interference in front of Trudeau, but who makes confidently unsupported allegations against peaceful protesters. Thomas comes from the WMD school of intelligence: intelligence is what the boss wants to hear.

The only difference between Thomas and the 2003 WMD crowd is that while the latter were mistaken about the secrets of a totalitarian state 5,000 miles away, Thomas knew nothing about her fellow citizens a hundred yards from her office door.

Thomas claimed at the POEC inquiry that the government didn't know who to talk to.

But they knew perfectly well who to arrest. And her falsehoods are swallowed whole and without question by the mainstream media, and by this ostentatiously radical writer. Wasn't there a time when the press was supposed to be oppositional, skeptical, raking the muck, speaking truth to power?

Moscrop and Thomas, radical journalist and security state official, are now on the same page: there has been a curious if not entirely unremarked (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi come to mind) confluence between the activist left and the upper reaches of the security state.

The long march through the institutions has attained state and police power. This is a standing and urgent threat to our civil liberties, and right now it threatens Tamara and Chris with prison for urging peaceful protest in a manner embarrassing to power.

Who is next, and what is to be done?

Extensively redacted Canadian government documents released to the Rouleau Inquiry (the Public Order Emergency Commission) into the Freedom Convoy and the Emergencies Act state that the Privy Council Office (PCO) — in other words, the Prime Minister’s executive office — was in touch with social media companies about “enforcement and actions to remove harmful content.”1 The language makes it clear that far from being exploratory, tentative, or mere information-gathering, these contacts had advanced to the point of “enforcement”, in other words of policing content. We are not told which social media companies were contacted, but other Rouleau Inquiry documents routinely mention tweets, so it is likely that Twitter was one of them.

The following screen shot is from National Security and Intelligence Advisor Jody Thomas’ briefing for 8 February 2022.

The language of “harmful content” displays a disturbing confidence that the officials of the Privy Council Office can say what is harmful. It also implies that speech should be regulated according to apprehended “harm,” which is to say according to its effects, rather than its truth. As so often, ideas and facts become “content,” and “content” is helpful or harmful, rather than true or false. The bureaucrats’ language opens the door to Taibbi’s definition of “mal-information”: true but off-narrative.

Along the way, one gathers that the Privy Council Office has a department called “Democratic Institutions.” Bureaucracies do not do irony, so apparently they censor in the name of democracy. The arrogance is as obvious as the problem: the necessary premise is that you are too stupid to sort out truth from falsehood, information from misinformation, so your superiors must do it for you. It is a view in some tension, to put it no more strongly, with any robust belief in democracy, let alone the judgement of the citizen.

There are other documented cases of Canadian government attempts to manipulate or to censor social media. The Canadian press documents 214 such requests, here.2 It gives three specific examples. One is a request to Facebook and Twitter to suppress a Toronto Sun news story unflattering to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Another is a request to remove personal details improperly posted by a Canada Revenue Agency (tax department) employee, and the third is a request to remove an account pretending to be the RCMP commissioner. These last two sound like valid and defensible attempts to protect private information and to prevent identity theft. It is the first that is problematic, suggesting that government agencies have the contacts and processes to make take-down requests, and that they do so with some regularity. It shows the government trying to censor social media, though not succeeding.

Blacklock’s Reporter has also reported on the Toronto Sun incident. In this case, the offending article was not removed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau often refers, with a certain tight-throated anger, to the malign effects of “disinformation and misinformation.” It is obvious that he and his government believe that falsehoods on the social media played a large part in the Freedom Convoy. It is equally obvious that his soi-disant progressive government was genuinely surprised, indeed panicked, at the size and popular character of the protests, and is determined that they not recur. Bills C-11 was passed recently, allowing the government to regulate social media algorithms, which effectively means to censor disliked “content.” Other bills regulating social media have been proposed. This is a government that sees social media as a danger to itself.

All of the above is compelling evidence that the Canadian government, like the American and the Australian, has tried to censor the internet. The evidence is persuasive, and in the case of the NSIA document, unambiguous. We must ask when, or if, there will be a Canadian #TwitterFiles release, in particular concerning the Canadian government’s authoritarian reaction to the Freedom Convoy.

The evidence indicates that such a release would show numerous attempts to control and censor speech on social media.

Tamara Lich, an organizer of the Freedom Convoy and of the GoFundMe/GiveSendGo online campaigns, remains in jail, having been denied bail.  A grandmother from Alberta who led a peaceful protest, she was described by Judge Julie Bourgeois as a criminal potentially facing years in prison, whose jailing “was necessary for the protection or safety of the public.”  Before her peaceful surrender, this dangerous criminal posted a video imploring her supporters to conduct themselves peacefully, and to treat the police with respect.

By contrast, violent criminals usually get bail. The Antifa member who drove a vehicle into Convoy supporters in Winnipeg, an act of vehicular assault that injured several people, was quickly bailed.  Obviously, Ms. Lich is on the wrong side.

It is relevant to mention that Judge Julie Bourgeois was a failed Liberal candidate in the election of 2011.  But one does not need to impute partisan hostility to this one judge to see that Ms. Lich and other anti-bureaucratic protesters face in the judiciary, as in the legal profession as a whole, a hostile institution.

Beverley McLachlin is the former long-time Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, a leader of the Canadian judiciary, and by extension of the legal profession.  As Chief Justice, she was a prominent judicial activist, usually to the left of elected politicians, often leading policy change.  She is at once a product of a leftist institutional climate and a shaper of that climate, not to mention a patron of careers that prosper within it.  Writing last week in The Globe and Mail, Judge McLachlin tells us of the ugliness of the freedom for which Ms. Lich demonstrated.1

The judge writes of “this vaunted ‘freedom,’” in sarcastic scare quotes, which tells us how the judiciary regards the freedom from state interference, and the personal independence, valued by many Canadians.  She then subjects the freedom convoy protestors to the now expected but evidence-free accusations of violence and racism.  But she does get one point right:  protesters did indeed claim the right to “malign public officials” if by that she means the right to criticize ministers.  It is a charge Putin might use.

At this point the Judge’s tone becomes patronizing and didactic, as though her targets were slow (which is of course exactly what she thinks).  Freedom, we are instructed, is not absolute (as though anyone had thought it was).  “Reasonable” (several times) limits apply to the Charter’s “bundle of rights and freedoms.”  The alternative is anarchy.  Free speech, we are to understand, is just a not-so-important part of a larger bundle.  Are we at Walmart?  Would you like toilet paper with your freedom of speech and assembly, subject to management approval?

Behind this denigratory view of freedom lies a very expansive account of the authority of the courts.  Governments, in the Judge’s view, must draw lines around citizens’ freedom, this “line-drawing” being then subject to the electorate’s judgement, but ultimately to the judgement of the courts.  There was a time when courts adjudicated the application of laws to particular circumstances, in the light of past case law and of the intentions of Parliament.  Judge McLachlin, reiterating a view that was clearly central to her work on the Supreme Court, subscribes to a doctrine of judicial supremacy in which both the rights of citizens and the actions of governments are subject to judicial approval or rejection, on the basis of very abstract notions of the social good.

Judge McLachlin finds an echo in law professor Martha Jackman, who explains on the same page that Canada’s Charter is not the U.S Bill of Rights.2  Tamara Lich’s husband had naively depended upon “First Amendment rights,” and of course Professor Jackman is right that he mistakenly refers to an American document.  But his real error, she goes on, was to suppose that he or his wife had any such right to free expression under any name.  Canada and the United States, the professor teaches, “have completely different legal systems.”  This is of course nonsense – both are based upon the English Common law – but it does illustrate the anti-Americanism that permeates the Ottawa state.  The American preference for liberty is particularly disdained.  The Anglo-Saxon legal and constitutional tradition, with its historic emphasis on what were once called the liberties of the subject, today cramps the power of the bureaucratic state.

Professor Jackman too teaches that Canadians’ rights are not absolute (the inevitable strawman), but subject to “reasonable limits.”  It is a point repeated several times, no doubt a key learning outcome.  Those limits are to be determined by a calculus of benefits and harm, informed (as for Judge Bentham) by expansive abstractions entirely open to judicial interpretation.  The truckers in Ottawa were, we are told, a threat to “the rule of law, a keystone of any democracy.”  A number or writers, myself included, have documented the civil and law-abiding character of the protesters, but mere facts compete with soaring phraseology untethered to any concrete reality, but useful to the project of de-legitimation.

At points, the professor’s mask slips:  we are told, by way of introduction, that rights must be limited in “complex and increasingly diverse societies such as ours.”  There we have it, in so many words:  the ideology of diversity requires serious limits on freedom.  Because we have the one, we must have less of the other:  I had imagined that perception to be a rightist conspiracy theory, but not according to our learned professor.  At least we have that straightened out.

Most readers of The Globe and Mail – real and aspiring members of the bureaucratic power elite – will already agree with our authorities that freedom is an ugly thing.  But these homilies are not aimed at them, or not directly.  They are offered rather as talking points, summarizing in a credentialed and linkable form what the discourse already believes, prefabricated for reiteration in less august papers, and no doubt from the bench too.

And the authorities have half a point:  they are exactly right that we do not in fact have the freedoms we had imagined.  That plain truth is advertently conflated with the idea that limits to freedom are a good thing, all in the service of reason, justification, democracy, even diversity – it’s a bit slippery.  It is a conflation relying largely on rote assertion, not feeling the need to attempt an argument.  This discourse, smoothly mixing the is with the ought, is characteristic of what political philosophers call legal positivism:  the doctrine that the law as it is has an elevated moral character, not because it is good or right or free, but exactly because it is the law.  It is an idea that has always been favoured by authoritarians and statists; its most eminent theorist was the brilliant jurist and sometime Nazi Carl Schmitt.

Unlike Justin Trudeau, I am not calling my opponents Nazis.  McLachlin and Jackman are not Nazis.  But the genealogy of their doctrine is authoritarian, however progressive or egalitarian they may think themselves.  They find their legal confusions compelling precisely because they occupy elite positions within the institutions of a state.  Their discourse, with its meaningless abstractions, its appeal to national prejudice, its use of assertion in place of argument, its dire vision of dangerous anarchy as the alternative to (their) power, is the discourse of power.

That discourse is aimed at the rest of us. It articulates the ideology of a vindictive bureaucratic state that has had quite enough of our freedom.  Tamara Lich and her comrades are in jail for the crime of organizing a protest embarrassing to its pretensions.