On January 23, 2024, we received the best imaginable two-year anniversary present for the Canadian truckers protest short of criminal prosecution of Tyrant Trudeau and his colluders.
As Michael Nevradakis writes in The Defender’s Canadian Truckers Score Big Victory Over Trudeau in Federal Court:
“In his 190-page ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act ‘does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness—justification, transparency and intelligibility—and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.’”
Michael asked me to provide remarks on the ruling, several of which appear in the article. Below is the mini-essay I wrote in response to his query.
When I learned about Justice Mosley’s refreshingly just decision, the first words that poured out were, “It is a good day for freedom!”
The moment the truckers began rolling toward Ottawa in January 2022, I felt a surge of joy that was like throwing open a window after having suffocated in a dank cell for two years. That euphoric feeling continued to swell during the ensuing weeks as I immersed myself in firsthand footage and witnessed what I called the Winter of Love in my Profile in Courage on the Canadian truckers.
This was the concretization of the secret to toppling tyranny I had revealed in a May 2021 essay as articulated by Étienne de La Boétie in The Politics of Obedience:
“You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
The Canadian truckers were the allegorical green grocer of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless who one day decided not to hang the government’s propaganda sign in his window, and, in so doing, “disrupted the game … [and] enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain.”
This single act of peaceful noncompliance triggers a cascade effect that dissolves the mental enslavement keeping the populace under the thrall of tyranny, and that is precisely what occurred as freedom convoys began erupting all over the world.
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Bouncy castles; pancake parties; marshmallow-roasting; fireworks; Sikhs dancing; spontaneous outbursts of songs like “Lean on Me” and “O Canada”; hot tubs in the middle of a snowy landscape—these were the markers of humanity shattering its shackles. Most impressively, it was accomplished through love rather than violence.
As Émile Zola1 writes in “J’Accuse …!”:
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
And yet, as this peaceful movement rose, so did the government’s tyranny. On February 7, 2022, I published a Letter to Justin Trudeau in which I outlined a path toward redemptive reconciliation. I suspect he read it because so many people tweeted it at him, and as a narcissist, he is unlikely to resist a letter with his name in the title. I also waged daily tweets sharing it and advising him to pursue diplomacy.
But Trudeau and his cabinet did not make even a single attempt to engage with the truckers. In blatant violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they leapt to invoking the Emergencies Act without meeting the necessary threshold.
This preposterously disproportionate response ripped back the curtains on what Frank Zappa describes as “the brick wall at the back of the theater”:
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“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
This is when soft totalitarianism hardened and could no longer be disguised by misdirecting language. While some may claim the protests failed because they did not achieve their immediate objective, they had broken the spell. One by one, Canadian provinces began dropping the mandates, and people all over the world could now see the brick wall—and began busting through it.
They achieved the injury to the principle of authority Gustave Le Bon describes in The Psychology of Revolution:
“The importance of the event [the storming of the Bastille] lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable. When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly.”
It is because of the Canadians’ historic act of mass peaceful noncompliance and their continued pursuit of justice that totalitarianism is beginning to crumble. And yes, I know the government will be appealing the federal court decision, but we must press on, relentlessly seeking accountability for crimes against humanity as the truth bursts forth like unruly weeds through a crack in the pavement.
