Programming note: The Mark Steyn Show airs tonight on GB News at 8pm GMT/3pm North American Eastern - and every night thereafter Monday to Thursday. US and Canadian viewers may find the replay a more convenient hour - that's 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific.
~In Ottawa, the Totalitarian Mammy-Singer continues his trashing of Canadian norms and institutions. During Friday afternoon's Clubland Q&A, we heard that our colleague and sometime guest-host Andrew Lawton had been pepper-sprayed by the shameful Ottawa coppers. He had to go to emergency, and was eventually discharged from hospital just before dawn on Saturday. Andrew being Andrew, he got straight back to work reporting what was happening on the streets around Parliament - and promptly caught a second hit from the peelers. He is now boasting that he has strong "natural immunity" to pepper.
It isn't really funny, though, is it? As officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put it in a leaked "group chat", "Time for the protestors to hear our jackboots on the ground." These and other remarks by constables purporting to enjoy the equine trampling of an elderly woman are now being "investigated" by the RCMP.
But there doesn't really seem to be a lot to "investigate", does there? Police brutality is out in the open - because two per cent of those who see it are outraged, and everyone else just gets the message and figures, "Whoa, better keep my head down till the storm passes..." It won't. Here are Canadian policemen beating the crap out of the citizenry in full view of the world:
Let's make sure millions of people see this. pic.twitter.com/Oq5XTEsCpM
— Bitcoin Gandalf The Orange (@BTCGandalf) February 20, 2022
~Friday's "suspension" of Parliament is even more disturbing. Both Commons and Senate are obliged by law to debate Trudeau's invocation of "emergency" powers within seven days. Instead, the parties were told they could not discuss the "emergency" because of a police operation related to the "emergency" - and the useless Loyal Opposition meekly accepted this circular insult and went home to enjoy a long weekend.
To be fair, some fought the good fight on their Twitter feeds. Chilliwack MP Mark Strahl, who sits in the Tory shadow cabinet, tweets:
Briane is a single mom from Chilliwack working a minimum wage job. She gave $50 to the convoy when it was 100% legal. She hasn't participated in any other way. Her bank account has now been frozen. This is who Justin Trudeau is actually targeting with his Emergencies Act orders.
So the Prime Minister is now freezing bank accounts of those who donate fifty bucks to people who oppose him. When Robert Mugabe did this, Zimbabwe got suspended from the Commonwealth. What's the difference, Lady Scotland?
Mr Strahl is, alas, wrong to suggest these actions derive from "emergency" powers. Chrystia Freeland, Canada's ever more sinister and ghoulish Deputy Prime Minister (and simultaneous board member of Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum), is quite upfront about making these "emergency" powers permanent:
Just now Chrystia Freeland details how some Emergency Act powers will be made permanent. (we actually thought she might wait a few days before enacting a permanent police state) pic.twitter.com/HavsTUeo0P
— not inklessPW (@inklessPW) February 18, 2022
A quarter-century back, in my National Post days, the ironically named Ms "Freeland" was a fellow mediocre hack, first at The Financial Times, then at The Globe & Mail, albeit one prone to take a Fleet Street contrarian's stand on things like Davos. She seems to have been so utterly transformed that I find myself staring in horror like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers after realising that Dana Wynter took a twenty-minute nap.
~At the suggestion of some Steyn Clubbers, I caught this discussion between Jordan Peterson and Rex Murphy. I have been watching Mr Murphy on telly for almost as long as I can remember, but for the first time ever I barely took in a word he was saying because his ashen devastated face seemed to be telling the story just as profoundly. The programme was called "The Catastrophe of Canada" and it was etched into the visages of both guest and host. As I've been saying, and as Ms Freeland confirms, things are moving very fast.
~I was sorry to hear that Jacques Poos had died. He was the second most famous Luxembourg politician of our times. Which sounds like the very definition of damning with faint praise, but is more impressive when one considers that he was runner-up to the eccentric Jean-Claude Juncker - or "Drunker", as everybody in London came to call him during the Brexit negotiations.
M Poos catapulted to global celebrity when Yugoslavia chanced to disintegrate during his presidency of the European Union. As befits a man who has reached the heights of Luxembourg's foreign ministry, he told the Americans to butt out, and declared as he was boarding his flight to Belgrade in 1991 that "The hour of Europe has come!" The hour of Europe came and went, and 150,000 corpses later the EU was only too glad to have the Americans butt in again.
He was a preposterous figure, but I think of his eminence as belonging to more innocent times, when one could proclaim "the hour of Europe" and be confident that at least half of the room wouldn't titter. Thirty years on, the hour of America seems to have gone too, and in Brussels the successor to M Poos is a near parody of an unmoored globalist shill. Rest in peace, Luxembourg colossus.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our latest Clubland Q&A, which was a rather sombre affair reflecting on Trudeau's shameful actions in Canada. Rick McGinnis's weekly film date was Steve McQueen in Junior Bonner, and our Sunday song selection, quite appropriately given the times, had the blues in the night. Our marquee presentation was my latest Sunday Poem: A Modern Love Letter by Mary Leapor. You can watch my recitation of the poem here.
If you were too busy getting trampled by a police horse in Ottawa this weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Clubland Q&A and Steyn's Sunday Poem are special productions for The Mark Steyn Club.
