A Social Credit System Arrives in Canada
Justin Trudeau just created a caste of economic untouchables. Can we stop this dystopian policy from taking hold in America?
by David Sachs Fen 20 2022
Last summer, I warned readers of Common Sense that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views.
That prediction has become reality.
What I could not have anticipated is that it would occur first in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, with the Canadian government itself directing the reprisals. It remains to be seen whether Canada will be a bellwether for the U.S. But anyone who cares about the future of America as a place where citizens are free to protest their government needs to understand what has just occurred and work to stop it from taking root here.
For the past three weeks, thousands of truckers have gathered in Ottawa and along the Canada-America border in protest of Covid restrictions and mandates. Rather than engage with them or listen to their concerns, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first denounced them as having “unacceptable views.” Then he demonized them as white supremacists, racists, and “swastika wavers.”
On Monday, the rhetoric turned to action when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. This heretofore-unused 1988 law gives the government virtually unlimited power for 30 days to deal with a crisis. Invoking the law under the present circumstance would require the threat or use of “serious violence,” yet the vast majority of protesters have been entirely peaceful—playing “We Are the World” and waving Maple Leaf flags. Indeed, the government has made little attempt to justify the need for emergency powers beyond Trudeau’s frequent bemoaning of the truckers’ alleged “hateful rhetoric.” His public safety minister Marco Mendocino stated that such extraordinary measures were necessary due to “intimidation, harassment, and expressions of hate.” Perhaps he doesn’t realize that none of these are listed in the law as valid reasons to invoke it.
Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites. In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy.
Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.
Already, a low-level government official in Ontario was fired after her $100 donation came to light. A gelato shop was forced to close when it received threats after its owner was revealed to have donated to the protest. On Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti went on Canadian television to say the quiet part aloud, namely that anyone contributing to “a pro-Trump movement” should be “worried” about their bank accounts and other financial assets being frozen.
The Canadian truckers have been so thoroughly defamed as racists and bigots by the media on both sides of the border that few are thinking about the nightmarish implications for ordinary citizens. For the most part, the CBC, CNN, MSNBC, and the major newspapers in both countries have cheered and egged Trudeau on as he descends into authoritarianism—even as various Canadian provinces rescind the vaccine mandates that originally inspired the protests.
Perhaps no one has been more enthusiastic than CNN contributor Juliette Kayyem. She took to Twitter to encourage Trudeau’s government to first “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers” and later to “cancel their insurance, suspend their driver’s licenses, prohibit any future regulatory verification for truckers,” and other ideas that seemed extreme until Trudeau adopted several of them. “Trust me,” declared Kayyem, “I will not run out of ways to make this hurt.” One suspects Trudeau won’t either, even as the coming end of the pandemic renders this entire dispute irrelevant. Funny, it’s almost as if “the cruelty is the point.”
Full article:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/a-social-credit-system-arrives-in?r=2bxqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=url