If Canada is going to allow Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to turn a once-free nation into an autocratic police state, then Parliament will have to vote today to allow it. Trudeau wants to make many of his “emergency” powers permanent.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/02/20/democracy-dies-in-canada-trudeau-government-to-make-some-of-their-new-authoritarian-measures-permanent-n1560716

But the emergency powers act he invoked to crush the truckers’ freedom protesters can only hold for seven days unless Parliament votes to extend it, and may the eternal light of shame shine on any member who does.

There have been so many developments and so many outrages just in the past couple of days that I can’t list them all. Here are just a few: The arrests of protesters in Ottawa have continued, although some say they weren’t taken into custody, just driven out of town and released, and many of them returned. This is possibly because they weren’t actually breaking any laws so there wasn’t anything they could be charged with if they were taken to a police station.

It turns out that the elderly lady in a mobility scooter who was trampled by a police horse was an Indigenous People’s leader of full Mohawk heritage. Or as Trudeau would call her, “a white supremacist.”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/02/20/heres-more-on-the-ottawa-freedom-convoy-woman-run-over-by-police-with-their-horses-n525440

The government crackdown on rights has gone so far overboard that people are having their bank accounts frozen just because they made donations to the truckers weeks ago before Trudeau even invoked his emergency, creating a new category of retroactive thought crimes.

https://instapundit.com/504817/

Coffee is also apparently insurrectionist. A café owner was reportedly threatened with arrest for serving coffee to truckers. And here’s video of police hitting a woman’s camera and threatening her for the crime of being from Alberta and trying to walk somewhere to buy coffee.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/02/20/watch-going-for-coffee-is-now-a-crime-in-ottawa-police-may-attack-and-threaten-you-n525362

This protest was never really about vaccine mandates (it’s reported that 90% of the truckers are already vaccinated.) It was certainly not about racism, as most of the truckers are minorities. It was about the heavy hand of the government crushing the people’s rights. If that wasn’t clear to begin with, it certainly should be now.

Instapundit has been doing a good job of rounding up all the latest stories and comments on this dark time in Canada’s history. You can find a lot more here:

https://instapundit.com/504808/

https://instapundit.com/504761/

And David Solway at PJ Media has a stark warning for Canadians titled “Requiem For a Nation.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/19/requiem-for-a-nation-n1560630

I hope Canadians will read it because as Solway writes, it’s up to them whether events of the next few days miraculously save their Charter of Rights and Freedoms from being “nothing but an irrelevant scrap of parchment,” or whether “Canada has been transformed into a federal caricature” whose “leaders are unaccountable and depraved and the majority of the population, to quote Aristotle, 'are not capable of sufficient rational appreciation of political ends.'”

Finally, here’s a warning for Americans who think they can ignore what’s happening to our neighbor to the north: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection says that Trudeau is following the same playbook that the left is following here to cement their own tyrannical rule: declare anyone who disagrees with them to be a lower class of “others” who hold “unacceptable views,” and have government collude with big tech, the financial industry and other systems that everyone relies on to shut their opponents out of the means of communication and the basic necessities of life.

It’s working in China, with their surveillance state and “social credit" system. If China’s too far away for Americans to see the dangers and stand up to stop it, then is Ottawa close enough?