Civil Liberties point to the Conservatives

In the Canadian election, the party called "Liberal" has a very poor civil liberties record, made more dangerous by the institutional hegemony of the left.

The Canadian federal election is tomorrow, and the Liberals need to be defeated, for the most basic of reasons: their attacks on civil liberties.

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

Trish Wood

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

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.

1.

And on the Liberals’ cynical use of “terrorism” allegations, and our two-tier “justice” system:

2. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/last-of-indigo-11-receive-conditional-discharges-with-probation-for-12-months/article_865e8b78-ccbb-461c-af22-329141fe6f7b.html#:~:text=The%20last%20of%20the%2011,co%2Daccused%20who%20pleaded%20guilty.; https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-york-university-professor-among-those-charged-with-defacing-indigo/; https://globalnews.ca/news/11103069/indigo-11-charges-dropped/