Anyone who missed Mark Meckler’s Battle Cry this week missed one of his best. As always, Mark hit on several of the most topical issues in the news, bringing our attention to those that matter the most to us as freedom-loving Convention of States activists. One of those issues was the Canadian government’s response to the protest that was mounted there by several hundred truckers and several thousand of their supporters.
As most of you know, it was a grassroots movement protesting their government’s economy-crippling COVID mask and vaccine mandates. It began in Canada's Western Provinces and worked its way literally across the continent to their capitol, Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Ontario. For three weeks, about 400 truckers, many of their families, and hundreds more non-affiliated supporters staged a peaceful protest, a display of civil disobedience that is a constitutionally enumerated right of all Canadian citizens, very similar to our First Amendment right to gather peacefully to petition our government for the redress of grievances.
What the leaders of the Canadian protest were publicly asking for was very simple: a sit-down with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or a representative, to negotiate an end to the protest, one that would hopefully usher in a relaxation of mandates that were being increasingly shown by newly released scientific data to be not only unnecessary but actually counter-productive, even harmful, especially to children.
Around the world and against this backdrop, literally dozens of other countries, states, cities, private businesses and public institutions were announcing the relaxation of their COVID-related mandates, if not entirely discontinuing them, all acknowledging the "new science.”
Trudeau’s response, as was reported here in an earlier blog, was to ignore the opportunity to negotiate. He chose instead to invoke for the first time ever the nation’s federal Emergency Act, authorizing the government to take extraordinary measures to respond to public welfare, public order, international and war emergencies. He had a decision to make… return the rights to the people, or remove them all indefinitely for the crime of simply asking.
The choice he made was clear.
Within 72 hours of that declaration, Trudeau's provincial and federal police, with the support of uniformed but unidentified military personnel, heavily armored tactical vehicles, and Mounties on horseback, violently corralled and arrested nearly 200 of the most steadfast protesters.
Their fate remains in limbo, subject to the non-representative, authoritarian government that replaced Canada’s democracy.
As Mark said in his Battle Cry, “This is some bad stuff!”
Yes… really bad stuff… and it’s happening for the first time in 245 years right here in North America, just across our northern border, the longest international border in the world.
Now, there may not be much beyond lending moral support that we as American citizens can do about what’s going on with our neighbors to the north, but there is something that we MUST do here at home before it’s too late to do anything at all: and that is to educate.
One of the primary tasks of the Convention of States is to educate the public. No single activity is more important, because the unvarnished truth of the matter is that without the broad public support that can only come from a common understanding of the dynamics of our constitutional republic, it’s going to be extremely difficult to reach the 34-state threshold for a convention.
And with what we are witnessing today, not just in Canada, but in an alarming number of increasingly authoritarian countries around the world, time is not our friend. If our government were ever to decide that the highest priority is to cling to the power that it has amassed by way of its COVID-related mandates rather than honor the protection of our general civil liberties that the Constitution guarantees, it will not matter if we meet the 34-state threshold… it will not matter if a convention proposes amendments restricting government intrusion in our lives… it will not matter if 38 states agree to ratify those proposals and amend the Constitution accordingly…
Because at that point, it’s the Constitution itself that will not matter.
As grim as that may sound, all is not lost if we resolve to persevere, to educate. We have our mission, we have the means, and we have the manpower to succeed. We are halfway there. Headlines like the ones we’ve just seen are opening what were once the blindest of eyes in the bluest of states. In what would be one of the most ironic “Hitchcock” endings of all time, it just might be the creeping totalitarianism on our own doorstep that finally pushes us over the top, the beginning of a return to the vision of our Founders, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.
