The Tyranny of Trudeau

The truckers are teaching him an overdue lesson in the limits of government.

Humans form governments not to surrender their liberty but to secure it. The state exists for man, not man for the state, as many natural law philosophers have observed. According to this understanding of government, the proper response to a tyrannical law is disobedience. An unjust law, after all, isn’t a real law at all. It is an act of violence that cries out for resistance. But self-serving government officials cast such laudable resistance as a threat to the state. In truth, it is only a threat to their tyranny.

So it goes in Canada, where its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is busy denouncing truckers for daring to defend their own freedom. “Blockages, illegal demonstrations are unacceptable, and are negatively impacting businesses and manufacturers,” he said this week. “We must do everything to bring them to an end.”

Who can take such rhetoric seriously, given all the damage outrageous COVID mandates have done to businesses? His outburst against the truckers — they are “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens’ daily lives” — is an apt description of the impact of his own decrees.

Even more pathetic is his attempt to hide his tyranny behind wokeness and wild mischaracterizations of the protests. “People of Ottawa don’t deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods, don’t deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner or a confederate flag or the insults and jeers just because they’re wearing a mask. That’s not who Canadians are,” he said.

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