It pains me to write this post.
I’ve seen Canada’s police in action many times over the course of my seven decades on this planet. Occasionally I have been in direct contact with a cop. More often, I can see or hear a police officer in close proximity dealing with a homeless person, a drunk, a domestic argument, or a traffic accident.
In that entire time, I haven’t once seen a Canadian police officer be anything less than polite and respectful. Cops have a lot of power. They could easily use that power to bully people. I have more than once seen others with similar levels of power - customs agents and immigration officials, for example - abusing their power. But I’ve never personally seen a Canadian cop behave like a bully. While that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it likely means it is a rare event.
Canadian cops have difficult, dangerous and highly stressful jobs. I am grateful for how diligently and fairly all the Canadian cops I have seen in action over the course of my life have done their jobs.
I’ll grant you, when I saw the video of the RCMP on horseback charging that poor woman in a wheelchair during the Truckers’ protest, it definitely shook my faith in our police. But, in fairness, an ugly, heavy-handed authoritarianism was pretty ubiquitous during the later stages of the pandemic. I can forgive it as a kind of temporary insanity that was widespread at the time.
All that being said, I found this video to be absolutely horrifying. In this short video, Rebel News reporter David Menzies is posing questions to Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Christia Freeland as she walks down the street. Suddenly a plainclothes police officer bumps into Menzies from behind, then announces that Menzies is under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Menzies is then hauled away in handcuffs.
It is so blatantly a bogus charge, it is nothing short of an embarrassment for the RCMP. (The officer made the arrest in plainclothes; perhaps he at least had enough decency to not want to sully the RCMP uniform.) What concerns me is that there were six cops involved in a clear-cut attempt to set Menzies up. So it seems unlikely that what happened was the result of a single cop with testosterone poisoning.
One has to ask: what’s going on here? Did they just want to harass Menzies? If so, the arrest was a public relations disaster; Rebel News must be rolling in new donations.
Maybe they were hoping to put Menzies in jail. Perhaps they had a judge lined up ready to do that, but the judge took one look at the video and said: “No Way!”
Canada’s mainstream media has clearly been thoroughly domesticated. Rebel News is a small outfit with a modest audience. Why bother to attack it all?
Perhaps we can see the risk Rebel News presents by what happened here. The Rebel News video went viral. Even Elon Musk and Pierre Poilievre. commented on it.
The video created such a storm that the CBC, Global and CTV all had to do pieces on it. Though all three did their best to diss Rebel News - they’re ‘not really journalists,’ and Menzies is sketchy because ‘he’s been in trouble with the law before’ - the ongoing harassment faced by independent journalists in Canada temporarily became a major news story. Rebel News is an uncontrollable wild-card, a chink in the armour of those who want to control the public narrative.
I suppose if you’re a billionaire or a mega-corporation, it’s not enough to buy off Canada’s politicians. If you’re asking those politicians to do stuff that looks shoddy and/or corrupt, you need to impose tight limits on what can be reported in the mainstream media. If you’re asking politicians to do illegal stuff, you’ll need to buy off parts of the justice system too.
That level of control is very useful. It explains how the Trudeau Liberals can stumble through eight years of scandal after scandal, and no-one even gets charged, let alone goes to jail.
It goes a long way towards explaining why journalists have become an endangered species in Canada’s mainstream media.
It probably also explains why Canada’s Ethics Commissioner has no problem with Justin Trudeau being given nine free nights at a $7,000 per night elite resort in Jamaica by a ‘family friend.’
At this point, it’s pretty clear to me that Canada can have billionaires, or be a country under the rule of law, but not both.
PS: One of the huge public services that Tucker Carlson does is he gives huge boost to brilliant, insightful thinkers who would not otherwise reach such a wide and diverse audience. His interview with podcaster and biologist Brett Weinstein eloquently lays out in one hour the fundamental problem with the mRNA vaccines.
PPS: John Mearsheimer also deserves kudos for his willingness to speak truth to power. This piece about the South African charges filed in the International Court of Justice re Israel’s ongoing Genocide in Gaza is an excellent and detailed summary.