INTO THE HEART OF CANADA'S DARKNESS

Ottawa as the Seat of the Administrative State

I am about to board a train to Ottawa and for unsettling reasons, I am feeling a wave of something akin to fear. I am a devoted journalist and for decades have felt some anxiety before a road trip but this is different.

Let me explain. First, thanks to all who have or will be contributing to the documentary funding campaign. It helped finance my trip for a few days of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber’s trial. It is possible the crown will drop the charges but not likely. I will be reporting back while I’m away and I will tell more on the coming podcast. I have a documentary crew heading there and my oldest friend, an acclaimed producer will meet me.

Our post-convoy world is upside down. Tamara and Chris, both hard working Canadians are facing charges that some would suggest should have disappeared after the Public Order Emergencies Commision debunked the media/Trudeau government anti-trucker messaging campaigns.

This from an interview the Prime Minister gave in French about people he’d never met but whom were worth only scorn.

Virtually all of the headline grabbing convoy scares were false: arson, Russia, guns, far-right American funding, Terry Fox statue desecration, violence. And yet the hatred for the convoy and its organizers grows like a pulsing tumour in the brains of our fellow citizens — many of them denizens of our capital city. Here is my podcast with Ray McGinnis who has written the best investigative takedown of charges against the convoy. He is a gem. This piece has had more attention globally than here in Canada.

And remember this oldy but goody.

The arson hoax was debunked on my podcast from the lips of a cop involved in the investigation — and months before the trucker exoneration was made public. Not a single commentator or politician called police to check if the story was true.

And hence my concern for my country — as we head into the convoy criminal trials. People are entitled to their opinions and to state them aggressively and they are even entitled to their falsehoods — that is covered by libel/slander laws. My worry is about the seemingly irrational fervor against the convoy. Yes, they were noisey and inconvenient and must have been super annoying. I feel Ottawa residents’ pain. But if the protests had been for a pet Liberal cause, would the response of locals have been different?

There was a sense that the truckers were fighting against all bad C-19 policy and given the courts and politicians refusal to go against the narrative, the only avenue open to concerned Canadians was protesting. If that is criminal — then where do we go from here? If Trudeau or an emissary had met with them, it is very likely the protest would have ended much sooner. But his own inflammatory rhetoric made it politically difficult to meet.

While there has been much generosity and kindness toward our project, Twitter is exposing some near cult-level aggression toward the truckers. Coming from mostly low-subscriber, uber-progressive accounts, they are attacked with terms like traitor , grifter and worse, without any evidence or underlying facts supplied to support the claim. None of the criminal charges reflect these accusations and the under-oath, exonerating evidence from the POEC doesn’t seem to have landed at all with the public. As a people, we must ask ourselves why? We are seeing how little effect facts and true information have following a propaganda effort, based on fear.

If this is what the other side of our multiple, ongoing national debates looks like - we are sunk. Are these the same people who wished death on the unvaccinated? The people who destroyed children on the altar of their own fears? Who agree with every government and public health diktat no matter how absurd and dangerous? Like my friend, Jay Bhattacharya, I’m working on forgiveness but I am pessimistic about our country ever coming back together again.

Ottawa is also the home of a civil suit against the truckers, brought by residents that could keep the defendants tied up in lawfare for years. Protesting on the wrong side of the narrative has become a dangerous mission.

My view is that we are seeing a level of what used to be called brainwashing so complete, no fact or new information will change opinions. Vaccines work. Save Ukraine. Protect “trans” kids, Lockdowns save lives. Convoy equals traitors.

Are they also on board for the church burnings that followed more bogus reporting and the attendant hysteria about mass graves and residential schools. Imagine what would have happened to anyone supporting a wrongfully accused residential school official. Facts don’t seem to matter here either. New reporting shows the unmarked graves to be a false story — burnished by the guilt-ridden and opportunistic — and enabled by certain chiefs. Personally, the school survivors I have met do tell harrowing tales and we should be ashamed of that period. But hyperbole and lies only make matters worse.

This summer, an alleged burial site near the former Pine Creek residential school in Manitoba was excavated over the course of four weeks. Earlier this month, chief Derek Nepinak of the Minegoziibe Anishinabe First Nation revealed the results of the excavation: no bodies had been discovered. He said that this takes ‘nothing away from the difficult truths experienced by our families who attended the residential school’.

This is just the latest in a series of excavations of alleged burial sites at one-time residential schools. They have been undertaken at the former Mohawk school in Brantford, the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia, the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton and the Kuper Island Residential School in British Columbia. And they have all failed to unearth a single unmarked grave. This really ought to call into question the whole narrative of mass slaughter at Canada’s residential schools.

There has certainly been no shortage of people over the past two years willing to speculate about the number of indigenous children that were supposedly killed in residential schools. In June 2021, after the first claims of unmarked graves emerged, Murray Sinclair, former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), said the residential-school death toll ‘could be in the 15,000-to-25,000 range’. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, called it a ‘genocide’.

We live in a country where it is easier to believe that churches were mass murdering innocent indigenous children than to think critically about what might have actually happened. This from a respected lawyer who accepted the horror as fact.

This conclusion was “inescapable” for the commissioners and for thousands of Indigenous people across the country. But as the lead author of the inquiry’s legal analysis of genocide, I know personally how denial and disbelief dominated the reactions of the mainstream media in Canada and of many non-Indigenous people in Canada that amounted to: “A genocide in Canada? Surely not!”

Then came the stunning news — the remains of 215 children found on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. It seems like the type of mass graves commonly found at sites where genocide took place.

The declarative statement above, that remains of 215 children were found — is demonstrably untrue.

Before the graves were debunked, I wondered if perhaps such deaths would more likely be the result of congregate setting illness — mass flu outbreaks and infections prior to the invention of antibiotics. Or the limitations of so-called ground penetrating radar. News media barely mentioned those possibilities. And Ottawa even contemplated making questions, a criminal code violation.

The response to the trucker criminal trials is a bleak reminder that we do not live in a free country anymore. Many institutions, both public and private, are captured. Brave souls are fighting but exhausted. Jordan Peterson is involved in an epic struggle as is my friend CJ Hopkins in Germany.

I now know how countries have fallen to the dark side. It starts in places like Ottawa, where personal comfort and fealty to power take precedent over principles of fair play and freedom.

Off I go. Back soon with a report on the trial.

Stay critical.

Note: I will return to posting the podcast here for comments next week.

Mailing address for documentary support;

Trish Wood is Critical

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St Clair Post Office

Toronto, Ontario Canada.