Canadian national, Dr. Jordan Peterson, bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, popular YouTube personality and clinical psychologist blasted the Trudeau government Tuesday morning in a flurry of tweets denouncing the Canadian government for invoking the Emergencies Act.
Justin Trudeau took the unprecedented action on Feb. 14 of invoking the Emergencies Act, granting his government far reaching powers, something that has never been done before in Canadian history. The only political action close to what Trudeau has done involved his father and former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who invoked the Emergencies Act’s predecessor, the War Measures Act, in the 1970s to quell terrorist activity by the then Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).
On Tuesday morning Peterson tweeted, “‘today we celebrate our national flag’ under martial law.”
In another tweet, he brought focus to an article published by the Toronto Star, a typically sympathetic media towards the liberal government, titled, “Invoking the Emergencies Act is a shocking admission of failure.”
Peterson, a long outspoken critic of the Trudeau government, said on Friday, Feb. 11 that Trudeau “can’t stop a decentralised movement with bluster, threats and force.” However, this appears to be exactly how the Trudeau government is addressing the matter.
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Peterson retweeted a statement by Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, who is vying to become the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, the official opposition to Trudeau’s government, and who is a staunch supporter of eliminating COVID-19 measures in Canada.
“While the rest of the world and provinces across Canada are beginning to remove restrictions and mandates, Justin Trudeau decided to pile new ones on targeting truckers’ livelihoods and now he’s got protests right around the country. And now he’s dropping in the polls, desperately trying to save his political career and save face for himself,” Poilievre said, adding that, “The solution is staring him in the face. All he has to do is listen to the experts, do what other countries are doing and that is to eliminate these mandates and restrictions to let the protesters, including the truckers, go back to their jobs and their lives.”
Peterson also tweeted a widely shared video depicting Trudeau speaking favorably about communist China saying, “Trudeau on the Chinese Communist Party: ‘their basic dictatorship’ offers ‘flexibility’ and ‘the ability to go green faster.’ Happy happy flag day Canadians. Or [expletive] else.”
Among his flurry of tweets was a statement by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) stating, “The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met.”
The CCLA continued, “The Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ & when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.’”
The thread concluded stating, “Governments regularly deal with difficult situations, and do so using powers granted to them by democratically elected representatives. Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties. #cdnpoli.”
