To rubber stamp, or not rubber stamp… that is the question.

Leonid Sirota: On the Emergencies Act, the Senate gets an equal say. It should lead

Back to the government’s emergency declaration: does the same convention mean that the Senate ought to follow the lead of the House of Commons and assent to it? It does not. Let me explain.

First, approving an emergency declaration is a different task from that of legislating. The House of Commons and the Senate are not making law. They are scrutinizing and checking the cabinet’s decision-making. Here, the electoral credentials of the House of Commons matter rather less than when it comes to enacting new laws.

Naomi Wolf: The Fall of Canada, The Danger in the US

[I]n this essay I wish to explain, especially to Canadians, what martial law really is, and how very dangerous it is, since many leaders there, especially Parliamentarians, appear to be in the treacherous “hangover” state of thinking that they still inhabit the old world that died when Justin Trudeau declared emergency law. I also wish to warn what happens historically at this moment in the decline of a formerly democratic nation, and what the murder of Canadian democracy — at least for now — means to the rest of the world.

Parliamentarians in Canada do not seem to understand that now their former colleague, Justin Trudeau, can arrest not just truckers, whose lawful protest has been declared illegal, but also the Parliamentarians themselves. This is, sadly, the next step in this kind of drama, historically. It is an extraordinarily dangerous sign that Parliament is not seated. When the Australian Parliament was suspended, by the time they reconvened, their powers had been dramatically curtailed. Tyrants seek to normalize the convening of Parliaments as “optional” or to suspend normal Parliamentary processes long enough to hollow out a legislative body’s deliberative powers, and to ensure that when and if a Parliament (or a Congress, for that matter) meets again, it will be merely a ceremonial assembly.

Parliamentarians in Canada also do not seem to understand that “dictator” is no longer rhetorical. A member of Parliament was shushed when he cried out this epithet, but the fact is that this is not a slur at this point. Justin Trudeau is by definition now in fact a dictator.

h/t Jim

Winnipeg adopts the Ottawa playbook. Looks like Heather Stefanson and others did not negotiate in faith.

Click on image for full screen.

Organizers announced on Facebook that they will be leaving. My guess is that they’re going to figure out another way to be heard.

Matt Taibbi: When boring people turn dangerous;

[Chrystia] Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.

Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:

It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…

Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later
years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers,
seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid
Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed
president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader
with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia,
offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . .
we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just
completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand
years.”

To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second
war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press… and
worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor
of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic
institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to
give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…

Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”

The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?

She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”.