But the Liberals are as greedy and as power-hungry as Xi:
My major new report, titled The Great Transshipment Scam: Rise, Scope, and Costs, details this and what we are doing to stop the scam and shut down China’s Shadow Transshipment Network, of which Canada is a Tier 1 member.
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Dominic Barton, former managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, yesterday was named chair of the federal agency Invest in Canada. The appointment came two years after investigators said McKinsey benefited from favouritism in winning $200 million worth of federal contracts: “I have no interest in making money.”
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This is Dominic Barton, the guy Carney just appointed as the CEO of Invest Canada.
— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) August 31, 2026
He doesn’t think adding 100 million people to Canada is a big deal because China has a city with the same population as Canada. And who cares about healthcare, we will just figure it out.
The… pic.twitter.com/wwdZ2AqYDD
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China’s free-speech efforts are an oxymoron; a permanent one-party police state does not exactly encourage debate. The European Union, for its part, thinks of itself as a bulwark of individual liberty, but it behaves in ways that are “post-liberal.” Restrictions on speech deemed to be hateful or, in some cases, simply disrespectful of authorities, has occurred in both Germany and Italy. The EU has ignored popular votes when they favour right-wing populists or seek to limit Brussell’s power.
Today in Europe, free speech is just a mild irritant. More worrisome still are developments in the U.K., the place that brought free speech to this continent. Instead of the Magna Carta, we see a great country becoming ever more authoritarian.
Take this. By some accounts, police in England and Wales made 10,000 arrests in 2024 for “communications offences.” The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport in 2025 was particularly chilling.
Canada seems to be moving in this same illiberal direction. To be sure, there are the promises of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantee the right of “free expression.” But the Charter also provided a breezeway for censorship by stating that speech is subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
This leaves power in the hands of the Prime Minister and Parliament to define “reasonable limits.” The growing Canadian thought police recently enacted the Combating Hate Act. And a bill that would impose strict new speech limits on social media companies is currently working its way through Parliament. As the American free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff says, Canada’s speech is moving from free to “free … ish.”
This approach is also reflected in the ever more out of control Human Rights Tribunal. Former Chairman David Thomas claims the Tribunal has been almost completely taken over by notions of victimization popular on college campuses, including questioning any aspect of “trans rights,” a particular priority of the cultural left and the professional institutions they have captured. He compared the Tribunal to a “state funded extortion ring” that seeks to force those it attacks to make a deal in order to avoid greater financial and professional harm.
We can see where this is going by recalling the crackdown against the Covid era “Freedom Convoy,” with its pattern of arrests and defunding. Canada has long seemed a bastion of tolerance, sexual freedom and democracy, but how does that work when Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that Muslim values and those of his country, a product largely founded on European culture and Christianity, are the same. Perhaps the urbane PM is unaware of the lack of freedoms for women, gays or dissenters in virtually every Muslim country.
Eighteen months after the bureaucratic controls began, came the decree making mRNA vaxxes compulsory. These novel injections were called vaccines, as if you were going to be jabbed with something akin to a measles or even a polio vaccine. They were not and are not at all like the earlier shots. They were touted as being 100% safe when no one could possibly know the medium- or long-term effects. In fact, later studies showed that myocarditis and thrombosis, among other malign effects, were associated with getting jabbed. We were told that all you needed was one — just like measles — but then you needed two, or three, or four…
What was going on here? And why were healthcare professionals, docs, and nurses objecting? For health bureaucrats and administrators and for the politicians who listened to them, it was absurd that front-line nurses and docs knew something about the vaxx risks they could observe daily in the responses of their patients. For their administrative superiors (but medical inferiors), the docs and nurses were just disobedient. Tamara was more accurate: by causing “so much suffering that didn’t need to happen,” the bureaucrats had “dehumanized us all.”
The effect of their supporters, however, was the opposite. For example, Tamara spoke with Neoline Villebrun, a clan mother and former chief from the Copper Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, who volunteered to organize drummers along the route to Ottawa, “and she was also going to pray for us.” The entire event was becoming more significant than any of the organizers initially realized, and certainly more than a conventional protest against a stupid and repressive government policy. “We were reuniting a people that had been torn apart. Here I was connecting with a Dene clan mother all the way out in the territories. Our message was reaching her, and she was reaching out to us. It made me understand what this was really about. This was about humanity, the opposite of dehumanization.”
Next, the government authorities and the politicians widened the net of those who had to be vaxxed to include cops, first responders, garbage collectors, priests, and (gasp!) university professors. As Tamara said, “every single guardrail that Canadians had counted on to hold government power in check had failed completely.” It started with the Charter and ended when common sense was replaced by bureaucratic fantasies that required complete submission and obedience. In Calgary, the grandiose intentions of the bureaucrats were exemplified by the arrest of a kid for shooting hoops in a park. By himself. Early in 2022, the federal health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, mused about making vaxxes compulsory for everyone. Later, he said that no one will ever be “fully vaccinated” against COVID, which meant compulsory vaxxes for everyone, forever.
In March 2020, a week after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 event a global pandemic, Justin Trudeau declared the truckers to be national heroes. They were “working overtime to keep us safe and the country moving.” He publicly thanked them “for being there for us” and assured them “that all Canadians are grateful for your service.” He continued this praise for weeks and on Easter compared the truckers to the soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge, defending “the values we hold dear.” Five months later, on Labour Day, the same story.
A little over a year later, however, the truckers were included among those needing to be vaxxed by January 15, 2022, like it or not — at least if they wanted to cross the border with the US. Among those who objected was Chris Barber, later Tamara’s co-defendant in litigation brought by the Government of Canada (which is still going on). The sociology of truckers, especially long-haul truckers delivering cukes from the Central Valley of California or avocados from Mexico, tends to attract proud, independent, and self-sufficient characters. Long days alone in the cab tend to provide ample time to think and to reinforce these personality traits. For many of them, it was simply insulting to be considered by politicians to be heroes one day and then to be compelled to submit to a jab about which many of them (and many other Canadians) had serious reservations.
The next development was the coalescing of several contingent networks of individuals who may have known one another or who may have heard of one another. Enabled by social media, they developed a proposal and then a plan to drive to Ottawa to protest the latest government overreach and to explain directly to government officials and politicians why those people were doing bad things. Tamara was initially uncertain about the entire enterprise but got involved anyway and came up with the name “Freedom Convoy.” As the convoy attracted more participants — at one point it was over a hundred kilometres long — and drew more attention to its message that the governments within Canada had massively exceeded their authority or, more directly, that government repression was based on force and fraud, as Machiavelli would say, Tamara became increasingly concerned about what the Government of Canada in particular would do next. And, in fact, as early as March 2020, while still praising the truckers, Justin Trudeau had contemplated eventually using the Emergencies Act to retain, he thought, control of the situation.
The story of the truckers’ presence in downtown Ottawa has already been beautifully and fairly told by Andrew Lawton (now an MP) and Donna Laframboise. Tamara’s more personal perspective added its own strength to the more general narrative of popular resistance to tyranny. Consider in this context how she was attacked by the mainstream media, starting with the truly repugnant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Early in her book, Tamara made an obvious remark: if you are an indigenous leader fighting oil and gas development or maybe just dissing Alberta or criticizing settler colonialism, you will have reporters lionizing your struggle on the nightly news. “But you’ll be treated a lot differently if you’re a Métis grandma with the wrong politics.” That was Tamara’s position, so her otherwise sparkling collective identity was ignored. Accordingly, the Ottawa Citizen noted that Lich “claims Native heritage.” In fact, she is a card-carrying member of the Alberta Métis Nation. CBC reached a new low by saying that Russians were behind the convoy, much as Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security advisor and the Canadian Deep State incarnate, said that the kids in the bouncy castles along Wellington Street were being abused.
The truckers had to deal with genuine political opponents as well. Under pressure from the Government of Canada, for example, GoFundMe folded — unlike what happened when their services were used by Black Lives Matter, which engaged in real violence. It took Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to threaten GoFundMe with a lawsuit in his state to stop them and hostile lawyers from trying to steal the truckers’ money. The convoy then moved their fundraising arm to a Christian organization. Likewise, Antifa was circulating around the Freedom Convoy, causing trouble that the mainstream media relished reporting. The Ottawa municipal cops “had no idea what they were doing,” for which the more professional Ontario Provincial Police apologized.
By the end of their stay, “we were tired. People wanted to go home. All we wanted was someone in power to meet with us and talk to us and hear us out.” It never happened. By mid-February, the truckers had decided to clear out, which was a gradual process, and head home. The timing was significant: “before Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, we had already struck a deal with the City of Ottawa to start clearing the trucks out.” The local cops, the city politicians, and the federal government all knew it. That was a signal to Trudeau to bring the hammer down. “Right after we had a deal to move the trucks. He didn’t want this to end peacefully. He wanted a fight.” In short, “Trudeau had blown everything up” in a spasm of aggression and vanity.
The story of her and Chris Barber’s trial and incarceration — exposure to “the faceless banality of state cruelty,” she called it — was appalling. Moiz Karimjee, a Liberal Party supporter, was the prosecutor. “Instead of Karimjee having to prove his case against me, my lawyers were forced to prove that I was innocent of the absurd claims that Karimjee kept making that had no basis in reality.” The judge who let Karimjee get away with all this abuse at her bail hearing, Julie Bourgeois, was another Liberal Party supporter, having carried the party’s banner in the 2011 election. At sentencing, Karimjee’s office went further still, demanding seven years for Tamara Lich and eight for Chris Barber on a mischief charge — near enough to the “dime” that Solzhenitsyn’s zeks drew in the GULAG. Even the trial judge, Heather Perkins-McVey, would have none of it, remarking that people convicted of robbery or aggravated assault rarely receive sentences in the range the Crown proposed.
To say that this protest scared the hell out of the Liberals would be an understatement.
