Chairman Trudeau’s digital fortress | The Spectator Australia

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t exactly been a pillar of liberty and democracy over the last two years. His threatening behaviour toward the Truck Driver Freedom protest, irrational economic pursuit of those who supported them, and public intolerance of medical autonomy has been a cause of concern for observers and citizens alike.

Since 2020, the world has held Trudeau up, alongside Victoria’s Daniel Andrews and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, as a cautionary tale about how swiftly emergency powers can create dictators inside democracies.

Constitutions, High Courts, Governors-General, and Human Rights Committees abandoned their posts to bow down in worship of these fearsome leaders. Runaway Prime Ministers and their governments did not have control over these entities, rather, the entities themselves were revealed as nothing more than a collection of frightened ideologues happy to throw civilisation to the wolves in order to keep themselves ‘safe’.

In Canada, Trudeau’s behaviour and public swooning over China’s communist system, spawned a fresh wave of suspicion that he might be the sneaky offspring of Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro rather than Canadian former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Is any of it true? We’ll never know, but in spirit, Trudeau is every bit the aspiring authoritarian with hefty doses of charm and narcissism.

Dictators do not exist in a vacuum. They require tools in order to enact their desired control over society. Increasingly, these weapons of mass enslavement are digital. Our prisons exist ‘in the cloud’ and our jailers are mindless algorithms.

When a nation is wealthy with citizens who own property, run businesses, and enjoy strict protections on privacy – it becomes extremely difficult for a government to threaten the population into compliance.

The Covid years saw citizen savings dry up, businesses collapse, properties fold, and the acceleration of ‘emergency’ legislation in which the threat of the virus was used to justify the creation of unthinkable levels of digital surveillance and privacy invasions. Vaccine passports, for instance, would have been a source of outrage were they advertised prior to 2020. Even the concept of having to ‘show your papers’ for a cup of coffee is the stuff of nightmares.

Far scarier than the digital squeeze placed on society during the pandemic was the swiftness with which ordinary people embraced tyranny in the hope it would wrap them in cotton wool and shield them from harm.

The atmosphere of terror created by leaders like Trudeau through press conferences dripping with fear-based propaganda worked a treat, showing that the majority of people were perfectly happy to abandon their wits and join the hysteria – many of them becoming government enforcers who policed their fellow citizens, reported them to authorities, intimidated them in public, or shunned them from society. Corporations – to this day – display ‘Covid Safe!’ as a statement of virtue rather than an unscientific slur that underpins discrimination.

Society is rapidly trying to sweep this blip of unacceptable pandemic behaviour under the carpet. The overwhelming desire to bury the memory of mass cruelty inflicted on the unvaccinated has reached the point where many now deny partaking in the twilight witch hunts of 2020-2022.

But we must remember what happened, acknowledge the madness that fear created, and punish those in positions of power and authority who incited the situation be they the press, politicians, health officials, bureaucrats, or businesses – because it is about to happen again.

Digital Identity is the formalisation of permanent digital surveillance and control of all citizens by, not only domestic government, but by a world government in all but name.

Birthed at a World Economic Forum Davos event in partnership with tech companies greedily snatching up government projects to implement it, Digital Identity was exported into most Western governments – often by so-called conservatives like Scott Morrison.

It is already being sold to us as ‘essential to recover from Covid’, ‘keep us safe online’, ‘protect us from the next pandemic’, ‘make our lives easier’, and ‘save the planet from Climate Change’.

The last one is the stick which governments intend to beat us with, wedge under civilisation, and then jump up and down until the last shreds of human autonomy are toppled.

Already discussed, with great excitement, is how Digital Identity will allow governments, banks, social media, and other organisations to track consumer behaviour and set up a system of immediate reward and punishment. Eaten too many steaks this month? Well, to keep your carbon footprint down, the government might reduce your fuel allowance. Does your bakery business use too much sugar, dairy, or coffee? Those fridge doors in the supermarket simply won’t open or your card will be declined at the till.

These ‘progresses’ are seen as necessary to permanently change human behaviour to make our lives more ‘sustainable’. This is a recipe for misery that cannot be easily undone once the dominoes start falling against the agricultural industry, and yet too many stubbornly write these stories off as ‘conspiracy’ despite Digital Identity legislation, Net Zero targets, and Carbon Credit rankings already coming into force.

At what point does the rest of the population ‘wake up’? Is it when they go down to the shops and wonder why an assortment of cockroaches and crickets are sitting in the meat section? What about when fresh food is so expensive it becomes a ‘special occasion’ and the rest of the week is spent eating processed crap out of a chemical lab?

The New Justice Centre Report in Canada has finally rung the alarm, albeit extremely late, on this post-food apocalypse.

Their report, Canada’s Road to Beijing: the digital threat to the Charter rights and freedoms of Canadians makes for sober reading.

Canada is moving quickly toward a greater reliance on digital identification (Digital ID) and digital currency technologies to form the basis of the relationship between state and citizen. Like physical ID, Digital ID technologies allow users to prove their identity and to access services and goods.

It goes on to state the various kinds of data that Digital ID collects about a person – everything from their medical records to their social media activity – all of which gets shared with the government who can then make decisions about whether future Canadian governments may ‘act upon what they know about citizens: to intervene in their affairs and, in some cases, to place unjustified restrictions on their Charter-protected rights and freedoms’.

There is no point in arguing that governments can be ‘trusted’ to act in a responsible, humane, and civilised manner. As Trudeau’s behaviour tracking down supporters of the truck protest already demonstrated, politicians are all too keen to use digital information to force citizens to comply with unpopular, contested, and deeply divisive political instructions.

As pointed out by the report, if Canada’s Digital Identity policy – a World Economic Forum instruction – is allowed to enter law, it will create a Chinese-style Social Credit System which, in China, gives the power of  ‘total surveillance to monitor, punish, and reward its citizens’.

When China promoted the Social Credit System in beta form to young users, it was gift-wrapped as a way for people to ‘gain free perks’ from the government as a reward for ‘moral’ behaviour. Just like Western kids getting excited by the government giving them ‘free stuff’ for making ‘environmentally friendly choices’, Chinese citizens initially saw the Social Credit System as a game – like any other they play on their phones. While being rewarded, the ‘game’ was fun, but once the Chinese government had ironed out the kinks in its technology, expanded its surveillance systems, and broadened the scope of facial recognition software to monitor ‘moods’ to make sure people weren’t lying – the system was turned on its head. Punishment and threat became the best way to manipulate behaviour. People’s scores dropped rapidly for minor offences until they lost access to travel, schools, and work. The Chinese government reports the system as a success because it curbs so-called undesirable behaviour.

This sounds exactly like the rationale offered by Western governments who used Vaccine Passports as a prototype for a Social Credit Score. Four shots? Good moral citizen. No shots? House arrest and poverty. See? We did the right thing because over 95 per cent are vaccinated. Never mind those abuses in human rights. Those are not important…

The report notes that:

China’s internet censorship is the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world. The Chinese Social Credit System can be compared to the Digital ID tools now being developed in Canada. While Canada has a superior tradition of freedom, this tradition has been on a downward trajectory for years (particularly since 2020), as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been violated on a massive scale.

It then goes into detail including the collection of facial scans of travellers inside Toronto’s Pearson Airport, and the secret surveillance of 33 million mobile devices to track the location of citizens for ‘pandemic reasons’.

China’s recent technology expansion places it in a position to integrate the Social Credit System with a Central Bank Digital Currency, giving the CCP regime the final say over how citizens access and use their money. At this point, personal wealth – which was always the basic requirement if one wished to be free from the state – is now the ultimate prison. Who will object to a political decision if doing so leads to immediate poverty?

This is the same path that Morrison’s former government – supported by Labor and the Greens – set us down with their Trusted Digital Identity Bill and accompanying Digital Economy Strategy 2030 which plans to force all businesses to adopt electronic transactions (instead of cash) and require Digital ID to get in the middle and approve transactions.

Legislators are not going to hang a lantern on the cataclysmic changes to the interaction between the economy and government – not least because many of the politicians who support these measures have no idea what they truly represent and no understanding of the system they are collapsing.

The end of democracy, to them, is ticking off a Bill they don’t understand on their way to a dinner party celebrating how wonderfully ‘progressive’ they are by embracing the digital age – leaving liberty to die in a champagne flute.

Why are Western leaders assembling the same set of digital tools as China?

Why aren’t Trudeau’s, Johnson’s, Ardern’s, and Morrison’s shallow claims about ‘safety’ challenged by the press?

Why hasn’t the general public taken more care with the maintenance of their liberty?

Western Civilisation must learn lessons from the Covid years.

Emergency powers are more dangerous than the ‘emergency’ they are trying to solve. Premiers and Prime Ministers have the same capacity for forming secretive dictatorships as Xi Jinping. And, the most important lesson of all, Digital Identity is a symptom of government addiction to power and control that would see the once great nations of the Western world serve our digital masters in the cloud.