Trudeau Revokes Emergency

So it's known that Prime Minister Trudeau has revoked his declaration of emergency, only a couple of days afer he and other officials strongly implied it would last at least 30 days. The most detailed explanation of the legal background and implications of the declaration I've seen is in the link above.

I've seen little other intelligent commentary, especially for the reasons behind the reversal. The explanations I've seen include:

• The state of emergency needed to be approved by the Canadian senate. Debate there was underway, and it didn't look good. The declration was withdrawn yesterday before the senate voted, and the senate canceled debate without a vote.
• Canadian banks and financial institutions may have been pleading behind scenes not to be put in a position of policing their clients.
• The Mounties were arbitrarily telling Canadian banks to freeze accounts, in at least some cases of people who had donated token amounts to the truckers without being physically present at any protest. This was possibly causing runs on banks -- earlier on Wednesday, it was announced that the Mounties were now "unfreezing" accounts, apparently in response to these reports.
• Some Liberal Party MPs were apparently forced to vote in favor of the declaratrion on February 14 on penalty of being expelled from caucus, but several are known to be skeptical that the declaration was needed.
• Trudeau and the cabinet may have underestimated public opposition to the declaration, especially in the wake of overreaction by Mounties and police in Ottawa, recorded in viral videos, as well as reports of arbitrary freezing of accounts. I have the impression that the situation was quickly changing, and I would speculate that Canadian senators were feeling the heat of constituent concern that the House of Commons hadn't felt the week before.

One thing that isn't completely clear is the status of those already arrested for offenses or who had their trucks confiscated during the ten days of the emergency declaration, and whether investigations of other individuals for activites before or during the declaration will continue. As of Wednesday,

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) announced on Wednesday that it has started an internal investigation over allegations that some OPP officers may have donated to the fundraiser for the anti-Wuhan coronavirus restriction Freedom Convoy protests.

The officers were allegedly identified as part of a leak of hacked fundraiser data from the crowdfunding website GiveSendGo by the left-leaning Toronto Star newspaper published this week.

OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson stated that the OPP was aware of the allegations and told broadcaster CBC that officers “appear to have made donations that have gone toward the unlawful protest in Ottawa.”

“The matter has been brought to the attention of OPP Command, and the OPP Professional Standards Unit has launched an internal conduct investigation into this matter,” Dickson told the CBC in an email.

In another case,

The director of communications in the Ontario ministry responsible for enforcing the law is out of a job after she was tied to a $100 donation supporting the convoy blockading Ottawa streets.

Marion Isabeau-Ringuette is among several government staffers and associates under scrutiny after their names or identifying information were found in a pair of leaks of some 100,000 donations to American crowdfunding website GiveSendGo.

“For the communications director to be financially supporting an unlawful, illegal occupation is definitely concerning,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife.

In the US, this individual would have quite the basis for both a wrongful termination suit and a defamation suit.

The impression I have is that the overreaction to the Ottawa protest and the emergency declaration have caused considerable damage to Canadian expectations that their institutions will protect their basic legal rights, that their police, especially the Mounties, behave professionally, and that the financial system can be trusted to handle their money. At least the Mounties are aware of the problem:

The RCMP is aware of the material circulating on social media pertaining to a chat group that includes some of its members, and we can confirm that we are looking into the matter. This material is not representative of those who have committed themselves to serving Canadians with integrity and professionalism.

. . . All members of the RCMP know that, whether on or off duty, they have a responsibility to hold themselves to the highest professional standards and are subject to the Code of Conduct of the RCMP at all times. This includes acting with integrity, fairness, and impartiality, and avoiding any potential conflicts between their professional responsibilities and private interests.

I don't think this is over.

Meanwhile, US truckers, inspired by the Canadian example, are on their way to Washington.

The Freedom Truckers, Solidarność, And The Underground Railroad

I've noticed complaints, not just from Prime Minister Trudeau but from other Canadians, that the Freedom Truckers have been partly funded by US donations. The first observation I would make is that, at least until the Canadian emergency declaration, there was nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral per se in making such a donation on either side of the border. There is no indication that any appeals for trucker funds were fraudulent.

The second observation I would make is that even before Canada became what is now constituted as Canada, there has been a friendly-adversarial relationship between the neighbors over human rights issues. Before the US Civil War, that territory was the most practical destination of the US Underground Railroad, which was an abolitionist network that facilitated the movement of escaped slaves to areas where they would be safe from recapture. However, even northern non-slave states in the US were required to return escaped slaves to their southern owners if they were caught. Canada wasn't under this obligation.

It appears that Canadians welcomed them, in part because the British had been quicker to abolish slavery. Followers of The Curse of Oak Island show recognize the case of Samuel Ball, an escaped slave from South Carolina who earned his freedom by fighting on the side of the British during the Revolution. Given the ambiguity of his situation in the US after 1783, he relocated to Nova Scotia, where he was welcomed and became a prosperous landowner.

During the Viet Nam War, Canada assisted US citizens who wished to escape conscription by making it easy for them to achieve landed immigrant status. I've got to assume this is also some source of pride for many Canadians, who must see themselves in such cases as a "true north" in the face of US injustices, and eventually the US issued an amnesty for US citizens who'd fled to Canada to avoid the draft. But it seems to me that these things can go both ways.

COVID lockdowns and other restrictive measures like curfews, limiting worship and other assembly, and limiting otherwise lawful business activity, are restrictions on human rights. Certainly in comparison to genocide, mass incarceration, wholesale confiscations of wealth and the like, they're milder, but they are in fact human rights abuses that can be justified only when the consequences of not violating such rights are worse. The record of the COVID panic has been that the restrictions have often been ineffective in stopping the disease at all and have had destructive side effects themselves, and even at best, the benefits of measures like vaccine mandates have been uncerain.

Efforts to negotiate even minimal relaxation of COVID restrictions, even in the face of clear evidence of their ineffectiveness, have been dificult in many countries, including Canada. Things have been worse in Australia and New Zealand, but those places aren't immediate US neighbors. There's a certain amount of good will between Americans and Canadians, especially at the people-to-people level involving the plebs, though not the elites. Americans and Canadians sympathize with people like truckers on both sides of the border. To claim that American truckers are just as subject to US border controls as Canadians, making American sympathies for Canadians somehow misguided, is to neglect the fact that the workers on both sides want both sets of controls, which have little medical justification, ameliorated or removed entirely.

This goes to another factor driving American sympathies: Americans and Canadians drive the same cars, eat the same food (with only a few exceptions), drink the same soda and beer, wear the same clothes. On the American side, COVID restrictions have been eased because states like Florida and Texas have been able to prove that things have turned out about the same with or without masks, social distance, or vaccines, which has made it easier for residents of other states to demand equivalent relaxations.

In Canada, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, no equivalent relaxations took place until the Freedom Convoy began its protests, at which point five provinces promptly did schedule some limited lifting. At the same time, US controls do continue in various states, often inconsistently enforced, medically unnecessary, and at best annoying. The Freedom Convoy has had greater effect on US politicians than in Canada in encouraging continued relaxations, which from a US perspective is reason enough to have helped out with it -- again, via channels that in the US remain completely legal, moral, and ethical, and were the same in Canada until the emergency was declared.

But the fact remains that COVID controls of any sort are now completely political. The Super Bowl, held in Los Angeles County under one of the few remaining US outdoor masking regimes, occurred with the masking rule entirely unenforced and largely flouted, with no observable impact on the disease. The Ottawa protest, which a year ago would have been denounced as a superspreader event, appears to have resulted in no noticeable outbreak. There was no serious condemnation of protesters as dangerous spreaders of infection; they are now guilty only of hooliganism, er, mischief.

US truckers now appear to be gearing up for their own convoy. Their goal, which I think is entirely appropriate, is to further efforts at completely eradicating the human rights abuse of COVID controls, which are largely unabated at the federal level in both the US and Canada.

The last case I would cite is US (and indeed Vatican) support for the Solidarity movement in Poland. I don't know what foreign money went to support this in what proportion, although CIA money was certainly involved, with Vatican money quite possibly in concert with the CIA; I would also imagine that Polish-Americans and other US private groups sent money as well. It was in opposition to human rights abuses. It was well, legally, ethically, and morally spent, whatever the objections from the Warsaw regime, just as much so as the money going from the US to Canadian truckers.

It Isn't Trudeau

Justin Trudeau has had a lot of vilification lately, especially from the US side, as a tyrant and a dictator. I think he's a lightweight, but nowhere even near, say, Evita Perón, which is to say that as dictators go, he's AAA baseball.. It's not clear at all for now exactly what the state of emergency he's imposed on Canada entitles him to do, except that it's said the emergency can't override Canadian charter rights, which themselves are pretty vague. For instance,

In April 1982, Canada entrenched in its constitution a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 7 of this new document provides that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice". The Canadian Bill of Rights (1960), and the British and American constitutions, safeguarded those fundamental rights through the phrase "due process of law" instead of "principles of fundamental justice".

As interpreted in US jurisprudence, "due process of law' implies

When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due process violation, which offends the rule of law.

What we're seeing in Canada following the declaration of emergency is truckers having their trucks seized and bank accounts frozen without a charge and without a trial. The mayor of Ottawa is currently saying the trucks will be sold. As far as anyone can tell, no relevant legislature has ever passed a law against what the truckers did specifying such penalties. In the US, this would definitely be a due process violation; in Canada, this is much less certain.

Someone at some point will presumably argue that seizing the truckers' means of livelihood without a charge or a trial violates "principles of fundamental justice", but listening to Trudeau himself in Parliament yesterday suggests he, or indeed a Canadian judge, will simply argue that Canada has always been founded on principles of fundamental justice, and it's precisely the un-Canadian behavior of the truckers that's put them in their pickle. Learn to code, guys. In fact, learn to code in the US.

At the start of the US rebellion against the UK, Canada as it was constituted at the time was offered to chance to join, and it chose not to. Different place. Always has been. For that matter, the Laginas are finding this out on Oak Island in a very different context. I would not go to Canada except to pass through quickly on the way to Alaska.

But there's a bigger issue here. What's happening now in Canada is just a special case of the COVID moral panic in its late, or "morning after" phase. US, and indeed at least some European, institutions have shown more resilience, especially in the end phase of the panic. The truckers' protests have had far more impact on US mayors, legislators, and governors than they have in Canada itself. But the truckers' protests are just a special case of a general recovery of sanity in the world population, and they came even as some Canadian provinces belatedly realized it was time to loosen up.

The COVID crisis worldwide was interpreted by the ruling elites as a delicious opportunity to suspend constitutionial protections everywhere. I thought when this all got started that it would be a long legal and political process to claw them back. But a big factor that drove the original moral panic was also Donald Trump. It's intriguing that so late in the process, Prime Minister Trudeau is blaming Trump, Trumpists, and "foreign" money for the truckers. He's a bit late to that particular game. Whatever Trump's own future may be, that genie is out of the bottle -- it's just that Trudeau still needs to get used to it.

Trump has been gone for more than a year. The COVID panic is winding down. There's a distinct fin de siècle quality to the ongoing Canadian drama. But it isn't really Trudeau's fault or his doing.

How Is The Putative Ukraine Crisis Not A Boondoggle?

Boondoggle has multiple meanings, but this one from the Urban Dictionary actually seems applicable to the current moment: there's some sort of diplomatic party going on in Munich, to which President Biden has dispatched Vice President Harris, who as far as anyone can tell is incapable of doing anything but relaxing/fun stuff other than work. Yesterday she made the following remarks at the Westin Grand Munich to illustrate that:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, this was an important trip to be here at the Munich Security Conference — in particular this year, as I said yesterday.

We are looking at a moment that is a very decisive moment on one of the bases for the Munich Security Conference and certainly one of the founding reasons for NATO, which is European security and the connection and alliance between Europe and the United States.

This was a productive trip, in terms of the extensive bilateral meetings that we had that were in furtherance of the ongoing collaboration and partnership with our Allies.

It was important in that, as you all know, this is a moment that is very dynamic. If not every hour, certainly every day, there seem to be new moments of interest and also of intelligence.

Why just yesterday afternoon, the defense minister made a most illuminating Power Point presentation! Seriously, against what we're being told is a background of tanks almost rolling into Kyiv, this is the relative urgency with which our officials are actually treating the situation. New moments of interest indeed. Over the weekend I ran into this gaseous think piece in The Atlantic, Putin Has Made America Great Again:

The story of the Ukraine crisis so far has been about many things: blackmail; realpolitik; appeasement; even, apparently, Western provocation regardless of the facts. But, here in Europe, the one thing it very much has not been about is American decline. In fact, from here, the story of this latest crisis is of the reestablishment of America the Good, America the Bold, America the Supreme—and, by extension, Europe the Weak.

, , , While America itself continues to struggle with its own sense of decline, its dominions in Europe are choosing to suspend their disbelief in the imperium all over again. After years of grumbling about American power, it took only the whiff of a threat from Moscow for Europe to recommit to the old order, thrusting the battered old fasces of imperial authority back into the hands of the emperor in Washington.

Why, they all got together in breakout sessions at the Westin Grand Munich to celebrate that very development! But hundreds of words farther down, we get to the real point:

In his inaugural address, Biden’s message to the world was that America had been tested, but had come back stronger as a result. The country would, he said, “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” America, he was saying, was ready to resume its role as leader of the free world, a “trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Rereading these lines today, in light of the Ukraine crisis, you can conclude that he has partly made good on his promise, despite the debacle in Afghanistan. He has shepherded the West into a unified position on Ukraine through careful and conciliatory diplomacy. Yet Russia’s challenge to the West today, as it amasses its troops on Ukraine’s borders, is predicated on its belief that American power is retreating, and with it the power of its example. Europe’s response, however, has been to reveal how powerful America remains.

Sleepy Joe? I don't see it. President Brandon at long last elected not to spend the holiday weekend in Delaware, instead waiting anxiously in the White House for Kamala Harris's latest tidbits of interest and intelligence, or so it would seem. The puzzling thing is that the US appears to be trying to inflame the situation:

The Washington Post obtained a copy of a letter sent from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Bathsheba Nell Crocker to Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. The letter warned that the U.S. has “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the report, calling it “absolute fiction” and saying during a call with reporters: “Do you realize that this is an absolute canard, a lie? It is absolute fiction. There is no such list. It’s a fake.”

Crocker, however, wrote in her letter that the U.S. is convinced Russia would “likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”

The letter also warns that Russia would commit “human rights violations and abuses” and would use extreme force against protesters.

The inclusion of the US political buzzword "LGBTQI+" suggests this is entirely for US domestic consumption. If they're so concerned about human rights abuses, why not complain about Trudeau, Ottawa, and the Mounties, who actually did commit abuses over the weekend, rather than Russia, who just might in the future? But Ambasador Bathsheba Nell Crocker is echoed by National Security Handler Jake Sullivan just this morning:

“We believe that any military operation of the size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” Sullivan outlined. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”

“But we also have intelligence to suggest that there will be an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies,” he continued. “It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them, and that is what we laid out in detail for the [United Nations] because we believe that the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border, as we anticipate they very well may do in the coming hours or days.”

Again, he's writing Tom Clancy thrillers about imaginary wars, and he's been doing it for weeks. Each time he does it, he sheds a little more credibility, and if Putin does invade at some point down the road, people will have minimized the possibility because Sullivan's predictions failed to come true, time after time. But I'm increasingly convinced the administration is stirring up an imaginary crisis for domestic consumption.

But Where's the Ukraine War?

Today is February 20, which is one of the dates National Security Handler Jake Sullivan proposed as a perhaps-as-early-as for Russian tanks to appear in the streets of Kyiv. The logic here appears to have been that the Olympics would seize the world's attention, giving Putin the opening to invade while everyone was distracted. The problem was that the Olympics turned out to be the most boring and uneventful in history, and they provided no distraction. They weren't even worth a yawn.

The distraction throughout this period has been in Canada. I'll get to that, but let's get to the more imnmediate problem of bad looks. Russian tanks in the streets of European capitals are a bad look. Always have been. Let's face it, they would immediately drown out figure skaters, no matter how good the figure skaters. The guy who's figured this out is Vladimir Putin, who in fact seems to be a world leader who learned something from the 20th century. I get the sense that he, if anyone, understands that if he can get what he wants without tanks in the streets, he'll do it. My take is that so far, he's succeeding.

In fact, he's doing so well that he's making President Biden look hysterical. Biden's been predicting tanks in the streets any day now since late last year, and his predictions keep not coming true. A growing part of the problm is that Biden's been reassuring us that his predictions are based on our intelligence:

“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week ... in the coming days,” Biden said, citing the “significant intelligence capability” of the United States.

These remarks were from Friday, as today's deadline of February 20 edged ever closer without tanks in the streets. It's getting more and more like the guys who predict the end of the world and have to keep moving the date forward, with lamer and lamer excuses each time. I'm not sasying this won't eventually happen, but if it does, it's going to be on Putin's schedule, not Biden's, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like Putin will get what he wants without a direct invasion.

Indeed, if Putin appears to have learned a thing or two from 20th century history class, Biden and US intelligence have not -- consider what they failed to predict, from Pearl Harbor to the Chinese intervention in Korea to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact to Al-Qaida. They aren't much good at all, something Truman and Reagan at least understood. No coincidence that they helped write 20th century history.

So let's move to Canada. It sounds like Prime Minister Trudeau skipped 20th century history class the day they covered how police running down peaceful demonstrators -- with horses, dogs, fire hoses, clubs, gas, whatever -- isn't a good look. You don't even need to shoot them, although Kent Sate teaches that's a bad look, too. There are far too many examples, St Petersburg 1905, Birmingham 1963, Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970, Tienanmen 1989, and so forth -- that there was an awful lot for Trudeau to ignore. And it seems to me that the lesson has been the same every time, the demonstrators are playing a long game, and as the victors, they eventually get to write the history. A few cracked heads, a few dog bites, a few put in jail for hooliganism or whatever, a few knocked down, even a few, or more than a few, shot dead -- they eventually come out on top.

I hate to say this, but the guy who paid attention in 20th century history class is Putin.

Not A Good Look

The puzzling thing to me is how quickly US civil authorities are backing off their COVID mandates even as Trudeau insists mandates even stricter than those in the US are non-negotiable, now to be enforced by horses running down the workers in the streets of the capital.

And US and Canadian COVID trends are just about identical:

US politicians are scrambling to announce they're "following the science", while Trudeau -- not even in step with his own provincial premiers -- is keeping the controls on by ukase. I don't know where this is going to end up, but it looks like we in the US owe the Canadian truckers a great deal. Events in Windsor and Ottawa have clearly concentrated US minds most wonderfully.

What's The New Narrative?

I saw a headline on one of the aggregators this morning: "NYT wonders: Is Putin still rational after two years of pandemic isolation?"

It’s one thing to use the madman theory of foreign relations as leverage. It’s quite another to actually have an insane man in charge of a very large, modern military. For years, people have operated on the assumption that Vladimir Putin acted on a coldly rational basis, and based on his pre-pandemic track record, that assumption not only proved safe but accurate.

As far as I can see, Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been in place since 2014, when he effectively seized Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine via separatist proxies. As Tucker Carlson put it,

But if there’s one thing you absolutely must know about Russia, if you’re going to navigate this world, that thing is that on February 16, 2022, Vladimir Putin is going to invade our closest ally in the world, Ukraine. So write that down — February 16, 2022, Ukraine invasion begins. That’s the day.

Joe Biden has been very clear about that, so were the Intel agencies and of course, their stenographers in the news media. As Politico put it, quote, “Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as February 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed.” A physical assault.

The Ukrainian state media outlet Ukrinform, however, offered an opinion from the scene:

Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for eight years already. These are the eight years of daily reports of deadly shelling, IDPs, and casualties among our military and civilians.

So, my first questiom is why anyone at the New York Times thinks COVID changed anything if Putin actually made his Ukraine move almost six years before anyone had even heard of COVID. A second question would be whether anyone, even at the New York Times, thinks any world leader has been locked down like ordinary people have been, such that it would make him crazy. Heck, Biden is the one who stays locked own.

President Biden, meanwhile,, is still giving the same message:

President Joe Biden warned Thursday morning a Russian attack on Ukraine could begin in the coming days, casting a new incursion into the country as all but certain and warning Moscow could stage events in the lead-up to generate a pretext for war.

. . . Pressed on whether he believes an attack will happen -- and when -- Biden said: "Yes. My sense is it will happen in the next several days."

So does he have a new invasion date? I've got to conclude that so far, Biden is looking ridiculous. Meanwhile, Putin has risked nothing, and he's lost nothing. He's effectively reinforced the status quo in Donbas and Crimea, someting Ukraine acknowledges. How is he insane?

The existing narrative isn't working. Someone needs to come up with a new one -- even if we accept that Putin is crazy, it simply means Biden is being jerked around by a crazy guy. Actually, for that matter, it's too bad neither Biden nor Speaker Pelosi got the name of Putin's plastic surgeon.