Author: Blazingcatfur

This week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the lightweight, unpopular elected leader of a country with a 93% vaccination rate for those over 60 and a total vaccination rate of 84%, announced that he would invoke the Emergencies Act in order to crack down on the Freedom Convoy — a group of protesters opposed to government vaccination mandates for truckers. Trudeau breathily announced that invocation of the law was in fact “reasonable and proportionate.” His public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, said that the actions were required thanks to “intimidation, harassment, and expressions of hate.”

Controversial new rules enacted by the Liberal government under the Emergencies Act will require crowdfunding platforms holding money for illegal convoy protests to report any suspicious transactions, government officials said.

That includes transactions exceeding $10,000,and those suspected to be tied to money laundering or terrorist activity.

But the details of how the new rules will apply to cryptocurrencies weren’t available Tuesday evening, a day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the government would invoke the Emergencies Act to shut down protests against COVID-19 mandates that have blocked streets in downtown Ottawa and border crossings to the U.S.

When Canadian truckers first signaled their intent to assemble a Freedom Convoy protesting their government’s draconian Covid-19 policies, including vaccine mandates and passports, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blew them off as a “fringe minority.”

Just this week, however, Trudeau invoked for the first time ever the Emergencies Act, the successor law to the War Measures Act, in order to mobilize the Canadian military to crush the Freedom Convoy and forcibly clear the truckers and their rigs from the streets of Ottawa. Somehow, this “fringe minority” has prompted the most authoritarian response from a Canadian government since Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, deployed soldiers in the October Crisis of 1970 to quell an actual separatist movement, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), after it kidnapped the deputy premier of Quebec and a British diplomat.

According to an old Israeli quip, the way to remove 500 Canadians from a swimming pool at closing time is to whisper, “Everybody out of the water, please.”

The implication is both clear and amusing to each group. Israelis are famous for and proud of being disobedient and unruly; Canadians are considered and view themselves as well-mannered and orderly.

But the joke, apparently, is on all concerned, now that the latter’s truckers have entered the picture. These guys aren’t exiting the proverbial premises with a subservient bow. On the contrary, they’re not only conducting a serious protest but leading others in the world to follow suit.

Questions over financing of sex abuse settlement as palace REFUSES to say if Queen, 95, is helping pay for it with Duke’s £18m Verbier chalet still not sold

Calls intensified today for the financial arrangements of Prince Andrew’s sex abuse lawsuit settlement to be revealed as Buckingham Palace again refused to say whether it could be partially funded by the Queen.

His mother is expected to foot some of the estimated £12million bill in a bid to draw a line under it before her much-anticipated Platinum Jubilee celebrations this summer. But there is anger at how the Queen, 95, has effectively been forced to bail out the ‘disgraced’ Duke of York, 61, whose modest pension from his time in the Royal Navy is now his only visible income – amid calls for the public to be told who is financing the deal.

Former Progressive Conservative Party leader Robert Stanfield had few misgivings at the end of a long political life that led many to conclude he was the best prime minister Canada never had.

However, he said his one regret as leader of the Opposition was giving Pierre Trudeau the benefit of the doubt over the invocation of the War Measures Act. Stanfield later admitted he wished he had dissented, instead of supporting a policy he said encouraged “confrontation, escalation and disillusionment.”