Danielle Kubes: The Liberals, not the Freedom Convoy, are who made this a ‘banana republic’

So the truth is finally out: the Liberals were pressured by some of the CEOs of Canada’s big five banks to stop the Freedom Convoy.

One bank chief executive of an investor to Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who had said, “I won’t invest another red cent in your banana republic in Canada.” The day after this conversation, the Liberal government chose to invoke the Emergencies Act, with Freeland saying the comment was “heart-stopping” for her, and made her realize how much the protests were affecting the Canadian economy.

That the Liberals chose to use an unprecedented state power instead of, let’s say, talking with the protesters, or rolling back vaccine mandates (that have completely disappeared anyway) is a prime example of how they disregard the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens.

What the Liberals failed to realize, and continue to fail to realize, is that they are the ones who created the conditions for the Freedom Convoy to thrive, with their support for draconian COVID measures, which, along with Italy and Australia, were among the strictest or longest in the developed world.

The Freedom Convoy was only able to arise in a country that was fed up and exhausted with mandates and shutdowns that often didn’t make sense. Was it any surprise that a segment of the population just couldn’t take it anymore?

A country of loyalists and royalists, we never fought for our freedom from the Crown and it shows. To our credit, we are generally more concerned with order and stability. But even we, or at least some of us, have our breaking point.

Where was Freeland and the bank CEOs when our economy was being decimated by lockdowns?

Have we forgotten that small businesses were forced to close their doors and livelihoods were ruined? Indoor dining was closed for over a year in Toronto — one of the longest shutdowns in the world. Similarly, movie theatres were closed for nine months, gyms for over eight months and spas and hair dressers for over 6 months. We all had to deal with expanding waistlines and shaggy hair. When they were allowed to reopen, they faced the recurring threat of shutdowns and were forced to deal with capacity limits.

Remember when, in Ontario, you couldn’t go into a Costco or Walmart to buy clothes, shoes or home goods because you were only allowed to buy groceries? Or when, in Manitoba, you weren’t allowed to go to a drive-in church, even if you were staying isolated in your car?

“We are experiencing one of the greatest infringement of civil liberties in a generation, and many measures taken by government are unjustified restrictions on our most fundamental rights,” said Christine Van Geyn, the litigation director at the Canadian Constitution Foundation, in December 2020.

Governments, both federal and provincial, gave themselves the power to disrupt our lives on a whim, force private businesses into bankruptcy and perform what amounted to gross COVID theatre — doing things so it would seem like they were taking action when in reality they were avoiding actions that would actually make a difference, such as pouring money into our health-care system or mounting a public health campaign against obesity, one of the key comorbidities that resulted in death.

In March, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business found that two-thirds of businesses reported taking on an average of around $160,000 in debt to make it through the first two years of the pandemic, and 14 per cent were still at risk of filing for bankruptcy or closing their doors.

And all that, for what? Douglas Allen, a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, examined over 80 COVID-19 studies and concluded that “lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of COVID-19 deaths.”

The only reason most small businesses were able to survive at all was because of financial support from the government, financed by massive borrowing that Canadians taxpayers will have to pay back.

Perhaps what small businesses needed was a large corporate champion — a succession of calls from bank CEOs to Freeland saying lockdowns were a “national crisis” and the government needed to “act immediately” to restore livelihoods. That seems to work pretty well.

But the calls only came when there were international concerns, when the Freedom Convoy was supposedly ruining our reputation as a place to invest.

Bank CEOs were apparently so desperate to get investment dollars that they were searching for reasons to freeze Canadian citizens’ bank accounts, even asking if the government could designate Freedom Convoy members as “terrorists,” so they could “seize the assets and impair them.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland clearly listened. They invoked a never-before-used law, meant for extreme circumstances like wartime, and used it to freeze over 200 bank accounts of ordinary Canadian citizens, without charging them with anything or procuring a court order.

The Liberals need a reminder that they do not work for the banks. They don’t work for U.S. President Joe Biden, who pressured them to end the border blockades. They work for the Canadian people — or at least they’re supposed to.

And the reality is, that the Freedom Convoy’s cry of frustration resonated with many Canadians. They raised over $10 million on GoFundMe in less than a week, the vast majority of which came from Canadian donors.

Regardless of what the Public Order Emergency Commission finds, the enormity of this action should not be lost on any of us. The government should not have have the right to confiscate private property on a whim, without any judicial oversight, based simply on the fact that those affected were involved with a movement that the government disagreed with.

These are not the actions of a parliamentary democracy. These are the actions of a banana republic, of a ruling class that is bent on getting its way, the public be damned.

National Post