The Economist February 19th 2022 Leaders 9praise them. Wellwishers have crowdfunded their cause.
Faced with this ruckus, Canada’s government should have
drawn a clear distinction between harmful acts and obnoxious
or foolish words. Peaceful protests are fine; blocking crucial
highways so that others cannot go about their business is not.
Some of the truckers shut down a bridge over which 25% of Can
ada’s goods trade with the United States passes. The police took
six days to remove them. Given that the protest blocked an esti
mated $350m of trade each day, this was needlessly slow.
The truckers are wrong about the vaccine mandate at the bor
der. Such rules are a reasonable precaution to slow the spread of
a deadly and highly infectious disease. Canada’s government is
right to enforce them. But the truckers have every right to ex
press their disagreement. A wise government would listen to
them and respond politely, taking their complaints seriously
and patiently explaining why covid restrictions, though oner
ous, are necessary for the time being.
Justin Trudeau has done the opposite. First, he refused to
meet them. Then, seizing on the fact that a few of the protesters
appear to be bigots, he attempted to put all of them outside the
boundaries of reasonable debate by condemning “the antiSem
itism, Islamophobia, antiblack racism, homophobia and trans
phobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past num
ber of days”. The police already have ample powers to quell dis
order. Yet on February 14th Mr Trudeau invoked emergency pow
ers under a 34yearold law that had never been used before. Itwould allow the government to declare protests illegal and
freeze the bank accounts of protesters without a court order.
Meanwhile, his Liberal government is mulling two worrying
changes to Canada’s already illiberal hatespeech laws. One
would allow Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal to impose large
fines on those it deems to have used hateful language. It has in
the past taken an expansive view of what counts as hateful, and
defendants would enjoy fewer safeguards than they do under
criminal law. The other proposed change would let individuals
file legal complaints against people preemptively, if they fear
that they may be about to say something hateful.
These are both terrible ideas. The Economisthas long argued
that free speech should be restricted only under exceptional cir
cumstances, such as when the speaker intends to incite physical
violence. Canada’s laws are already more restrictive than this,
and the country’s illiberal left would like them to be still more
so. Academics have been suspended or disciplined for writing
that Canada is “not racist” or for holding gendercritical views.
The proposed amendments would give illiberal activists legal
tools to harass conservative religious folk, traditional feminists
and many more besides, simply for holding views that the left
finds offensive. Worse, it would allow some to be gagged before
they speak.
Canada is not yet a rancorous or bitterly divided society. If Mr
Trudeau wants to keepit that way, he should stop trying to police
Canadians’ thoughts.n“Y
ou mayonly have lent us your vote. You may not think of
yourself as a natural Tory.” In his victory speech after the
general election in 2019 Boris Johnson acknowledged that he
owed his majority to a combination of firsttime and longterm
Conservative voters, brought together by a desire to end the bat
tles over Brexit and fear of a farleft Labour government under
Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Johnson offered unity not just to a divided
country, but also to his own divided party, riven by civil war after
the referendum. It is now clear that this unity was a façade.
The past few months have been torrid for the
prime minister. First he tried a dirty parliamen
tary manoeuvre to protect Owen Paterson, an
old friend and fellow mp, from punishment for
his breaches of lobbying rules. Mr Johnson was
then revealed to have attended a series of par
ties during covid19 lockdowns. Police are now
investigating; on February 11th his office con
firmed that he was among those required to re
spond to official questioning. Tory mps are struggling to muster
the courage to call a vote of no confidence. They should: a dis
regard for the truth and a lack of application make Mr Johnson a
poor prime minister. But he is a symptom of what ails the Con
servative Party, not the cause. If Britain is to have the govern
ment it needs, getting rid of him will not be enough.
After 12 years in power, Conservative mps have become care
less of the law and addicted to protest and rebellion (see Britain
section). Instead of governing, they posture and grandstand.Their party used to have a reputation for weaving disparate ideo
logical strands together in order to gain and wield power. Today
what was once a broad church is bedevilled by schisms.
The Conservative scofflaws go beyond breaching the covid
lockdowns that they themselves imposed. After fighting for a
diamondhard Brexit, the winners took victory as a mandate to
ignore rules big and small. In 2019 Mr Johnson suspended Parlia
ment to avoid inconvenient scrutiny of his Brexit plans; the
courts concluded this was unlawful. Under his leadership the
ministerial code of conduct has become discre
tionary. His government’s attitude towards the
Northern Ireland protocol, a part of the exit deal
it struck with the euthat it now finds trouble
some, is to threaten to tear it up.
Rather than making peace after the eu refer
endum, the Brexiteers purged Remainers from
government. That left it needlessly short of tal
ent. Britain’s first cabinet in decades to be inde
pendent of the eu has the sheen of newness. But underneath its
Brexity surface, it is shopworn: entitled, undisciplined and com
placent. It lacks fresh thinking and the fear of returning to impo
tent opposition. Even ministers indulge in the politics of ges
ture—threatening to defund the bbc for alleged breaches of im
partiality rather than soberly reconsidering the licence fee; or
proposing to send the Royal Navy to repel irregular migrants
crossing the English Channel rather than cooperating with
France to stop them setting off.The malaise at the heart of the ConservativesFactional dissipation
British politics