Flirting With Dictatorship
This is what the collapse of a Western, liberal, democratic, freedom-loving country looks like. Canada came under martial law after its House of Commons approved emergency powers invoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to squash protests against vaccine mandates. The dispute surrounds the government’s insistence that truck drivers and other transportation workers get vaccinated against covid-19 if they want to enter Canada. Some protesters were arrested, their trucks were towed away, and their bank accounts were frozen.
Many have accused Justin Trudeau of acting like a dictator. Conservative member of Parliament Andrew Scheer noted that the prime minister agreed to meet with American Indians who blocked the path of a planned pipeline in 2020 but refused to negotiate with truckers who did not want to get vaccinated.
Sheer is not the only prominent figure making this comparison. Romanian politician Cristian-Vasile Terheș compared Trudeau to Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who ruled Romania with an iron fist when Terheș was a child. Talk show host Dennis Prager openly pondered whether Canada was now North America’s Cuba. The Wall Street Journal accused Trudeau of acting like a “tin-pot dictator.” Prominent billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Maybe Canadians should have paid more attention in 2013 when Trudeau told a group of fundraisers, “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.” Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, gave a fiery speech in 1942 calling on Canadians to rise up, overthrow their capitalist government, and establish a socialist dictatorship. Now it looks like the younger Trudeau may have accomplished his father’s dream by hijacking Canada’s government from the inside.
Freedom Convoy
The covid-19 crisis has offered authoritarian leaders around the world a chance to transfer control of citizens’ lives from the citizens themselves to the government. Yet Canada has experienced a lot more pandemic pain than other nations.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s covid Misery Index ranked Canada sixth in its analysis of 15 nations at how miserable the pandemic is making its citizens. The index showed that other nations managed to maintain hospitalization and death rates at levels comparable to Canada without harsh restrictions and lockdowns. The Trudeau government ignored such findings. Rather than lightening up and giving citizens their rights back, it imposed a new mandate on January 15 requiring truckers to present proof of vaccination at the border if they want to enter Canada.
This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Within a week, thousands of truckers began gathering into the longest motorcade in human history. They had had enough. Starting in British Columbia and traveling 2,000 miles in seven days, as many as 11,000 rigs joined the motorcade, extending for as long as 93 miles, on the way to the nation’s capital, Ottawa. The first of hundreds of trucks in this “Freedom Convoy” entered the city on January 29.
Initially, Trudeau dismissed the convoy as the protest of a “fringe minority,” but thousands of Canadians along the route came out and lined overpasses holding signs, waving flags, setting off fireworks, and cheering the truckers. One online fundraising campaign received more than 120,000 donations worth nearly $8 million to help pay for fuel and other expenses. That was more in a single week than Canada’s five largest political parties raised in the entire fourth quarter of 2021, combined. The Trumpet’s Canada correspondent, Abraham Blondeau, reported that he “has never seen a cause unite Canadians and inspire patriotic displays as this movement has done.”
Several Canadian members of Parliament cheered the Freedom Convoy and condemned Trudeau regime vaccination mandates, while Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole agreed to meet with the protesters and posted a video online noting how Trudeau’s vaccine mandates will put tens of thousands of Canadians out of work, increase scarcity and prices for produce and food, and leave produce rotting in the warehouses of the United States, Canada’s largest trade partner.
Trudeau characterized such statements as fear-mongering and then went into hiding, literally, before the truckers arrived and parked on Wellington Street and in the city’s core. He claimed to have contracted asymptomatic covid-19 and therefore needed to quarantine himself in an undisclosed location. Yet he still delivered recorded remarks associating the truckers with Nazism, racism, vandalism and hate as he devised a plan to get rid of the protesters.
Fighting Tyranny
With the convoy in Ottawa, many protesters stated that they would not leave until all covid-19 restrictions and mandates had been repealed. The corporate media slandered the protesters as fascists and white nationalists, but the video footage of the protests revealed a very different picture. Numerous reports showed the truckers at Parliament Hill and elsewhere to be nonviolent, polite and happy. Videos show truckers and other protesters in large crowds waving Canadian flags, playing street hockey, receiving coffee and other gifts from supportive Canadians, and chanting, “Freedom!”
A flag with a swastika on it was spotted in Ottawa when Conservative Party M.P. Michael Cooper went out to show support for the protesters. But it was spotted when a protester conspicuously walked behind Cooper while he was being interviewed by a news channel, leading many to suspect the protester was actually a leftist trying to discredit the protests. Nevertheless, the media jumped on the chance to double down on their narrative that the protest was full of white supremacists.
After Trudeau came out of hiding on February 7, he spoke in an emergency session of Parliament to condemn the protesters for “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens’ daily lives.” He failed to appreciate the irony in his statement: The protests were against vaccine mandates that blockaded the economy, subverted democracy, and disrupted citizens’ daily lives. And the government was ignoring these concerns.
With hundreds of protesters still in Ottawa, a new group of protesters began gathering on the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario. This bridge is the busiest international land-border crossing in North America and accounts for nearly a third of the two-way annual trade between Canada and the U.S., so blockading it would surely get the Canadian government’s attention. The protesters were right. But rather than reconsidering covid-19 vaccine mandates and related social restrictions, Trudeau did something very different. On February 14, he invoked the Emergencies Act, basically declaring war on his own people.
War Measures
This statute is the successor to the War Measures Act. It has only been used three times in Canadian history: during World War i, World War ii and, most controversially, during the October Crisis in 1970. In that third instance, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau suspended civil liberties to stop terrorists and rescue a kidnapped provincial deputy premier and a British diplomat.
Unlike his father, Justin Trudeau suspended civil liberties to stop a peaceful and even festive protest and to force thousands of law-abiding citizens to subject themselves to vaccination or lose their jobs. The Emergencies Act gave his regime powers usually reserved for national emergencies like a state of war, such as dispersing and arresting demonstrators and freezing bank accounts of anyone connected to protests. And Trudeau wasted no time in using these powers. Canadian police immediately cleared the Ambassador Bridge and arrested nearly 200 people in downtown Ottawa. And they weren’t gentle about it: They fired tear gas and used batons. One video showed mounted officers trampling an elderly Native American woman with their horses. And Rebel News in Canada released messages between members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police revealing that officers actually wanted to harm these protesting members of the public.
Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police froze 206 financial products, including bank and corporate accounts, of those involved with the protests. One M.P. revealed that the Mounties froze the bank account of a single mother working a minimum-wage job because she donated $50 to an anti-vaccine mandates protest back before the government warned people to stop donating to the trucker protests.
Many Conservatives voiced opposition to Trudeau’s crackdown. Trudeau shot back: “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas; they can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag. We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, to be able to get their lives back.” He missed the irony that his dictatorial lockdowns even before the Emergencies Act blocked millions of Canadians from getting to their jobs, from getting their lives back. He failed to grasp the irony that he was the son of a fascist sympathizer smearing Conservatives as Nazis when some of the Conservatives in the room were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. When this fact was pointed out to him, he refused to apologize.
On February 21, Canada’s House of Commons affirmed Trudeau’s use of emergency powers in a 185-to-151 vote, basically making Trudeau Canada’s dictator. If a group of truckers blocking a bridge and playing hockey in front of the capital constitutes a threat big enough that the prime minister needs war powers to handle it, then any protesters who demonstrate against the Trudeau regime’s policies are in danger of being arrested and having their financial assets frozen.
Trudeau ended the war measures on February 23, saying there was no longer a national emergency now that the protesters had been dispersed. Yet the overwhelming support he got from the Canadian Liberal Party has demonstrated that he can declare another state of emergency whenever a group of people stands up against his illegal power grabs. The Wall Street Journal is right: Trudeau is acting like the tin-pot dictators his father so often praised.
Bitter Affliction
For decades, the late Herbert W. Armstrong taught that the United States and British Commonwealth were descended from the ancient Israelite tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. This truth means that end-time prophecies like Hosea 7:8-9 are actually about modern-day America and Canada mixing themselves together with foreign peoples and, by extension, foreign ideologies like communism. The far-left ideas put forward by the U.S. Democratic Party and the Canadian Liberal Party are not based on traditional values and biblical virtue. They are ideas that were introduced into end-time Israel from German and Russian universities. For decades, these anti-Bible ideologies have subversively “devoured” America and Canada’s strength while the average citizen “knows it not.”
“What we fail to grasp, in the struggle with Russia, is this,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956, during the Cold War. “We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic worldwide, plain-clothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare. It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this, cleverly disguised as a harmless political party!”
Like Barack Obama in the United States, Justin Trudeau was mentored by Communists and Communist sympathizers. These men came to power by pretending they were more moderate than they are in reality. But the coronavirus crisis is exposing these men’s true identities. They are Communists using covid-19 to weaken America’s and Canada’s industrial and economic power while empowering themselves and their political allies at the expense of their own people.
This is a sobering reality, but it was actually prophesied in your Bible. As my father, Gerald Flurry, explained in his article “What Will Happen After Trump Regains Power,” 2 Kings 14:26-27 is a prophecy about a time when the end-time nations of Israel suffer such bitter affliction that it threatens to completely destroy them. So God has to raise up an end-time type of King Jeroboam ii to beat back the afflicters long enough to give people one last chance to repent.
Today, the radical left stands ready to blot out the political freedoms, cultural values, and biblical virtues that made America and Canada great nations. God is going to have to intervene to save us from the abyss, one last time. But why? Is He saving us just to “get back to the way things were,” as many truckers and others have expressed it?
Getting back to the way things were 20 years ago is not the answer. As you peer over the precipice, as you feel yourself getting pushed toward it, it’s time to realize that you have only one hope. That hope is not in patriotic truckers or in a political party or in Erin O’Toole or in Donald Trump. Your only hope depends entirely on repenting of sin (Amos 7:8). It depends on recognizing not only that our leaders are flawed, that our parties are flawed, and that our movements are flawed, but that, yes, you yourself are flawed. “God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and cannot be destroyed,” British politician Norman Angell said, “except by itself.”
If you are ready to face what you need to face, ready to realize the individual accountability each of us has toward the God who made America and Canada great in the first place, request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong.