Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday he was removing emergency powers under which he called out federal troops to arrest truckers in the Freedom Convoy who may be blocking bridges; threatened to seize their trucks and sell them; froze money that was donated to support the truckers' cause; and had ordinary citizens arrested for showing any support for the protest.
In short, Canada – once considered a free democracy with legal protections similar to those in America – is fast becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. But Curtis Houck of Media Research Center says as far as the American media is concerned, not much was happening north of the U.S. border.
"[They expressed] very little concern about the civil liberties of people being impaled, the privacy issues of those who donated to the cause of the truckers having their assets frozen – [and] very little interest or criticism of the trucker's trucks and their assets being taken," says the MRC spokesman.
Houock says in his opinion, the mainstream media was apparently taking its talking points from the new authoritarian government in Canada.
"It's been more of a straightforward news report, almost a stenography of the Canadian government saying The police moved in, people were arrested," he tells AFN. "It was almost like a public information officer giving a report in script to the broadcast networks and they just kind of ran with it."
So, now an American "freedom convoy" is heading toward Washington, DC. Houck says the coverage is about to become very different.
"I think we're going to get a lot of editorializing," he predicts. "They weren't huge fans of all what's going on in Canada. I would have to say that [the coverage] would definitely be seen through more political lens."
Another account closed
Meanwhile, a conservative advocate in Canada says even though the Freedom Convoy has ended, the Canadian people are fighting on – and the truckers are fighting back.
"Several of the truckers who are involved in this said that they will not deliver any goods to Ottawa any longer," reports Brian Rushfeldt, co-founder of a family advocacy group in Canada. "[They said] that that's simply not going to happen because of the tyrannical actions of Trudeau and the mistrust that they have now of even driving their rigs into the city of Ottawa."
In addition, says Rushfeldt, some Canadians – himself included – are pushing back against banks that froze the accounts of individuals who financially supported the truckers' cause.
"[My wife] and I removed all of our money from TD Bank, which we've dealt with for 25 years. They were the first ones to freeze the GoFundMe bank accounts," he points out.
"So, I went took all my money out of the TD Bank account and put it in a provincial bank which doesn't operate under the Bank of Canada rules – and I'm not the only one."
In fact, AFN reported yesterday that ConservativeHQ in Manassas, Virginia, also chose to withdraw its money from a nearby TD Bank in protest of the bank's decision.
