Justin Trudeau and the Alchemy of Irony

Canada’s prime minister won a skirmish but lost his credibility, which means that he has also lost legitimacy and will lose the war.

s the philosopher Bertie Wooster was wont to observe, “it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.” Authorities are divided on whether Bertie was correct in attributing the observation to Shakespeare. Perhaps it has its origin in the reflections of some other sage. But regarding the pertinence of the phenomenon to the conduct of human affairs there seems to be general agreement. The Greek tragedians analyzed it as a cosmic interplay of ὕβρις and ἄτη, arrogance followed by infatuation and ruin. I am not sure whether little Justin Trudeau, prime minister pro tem of Canada, has given much thought to the operation of this awful (in the old sense) dialectic, but I suspect that he is about to make its close and palpable acquaintance.

Trudeau—or, as the great Sarah Hoyt denominates him, “Trudescu” or “Castreau”—initially responded to Canada’s “Revolt of the Masses,” a.k.a. the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, by skedaddling out of town and cowering in some presumably secure and definitely unidentified place.

A couple of days later, Trudeau popped his head up over the top of the fox hole and nothing happened. So he climbed out, shook his soft and tiny fists, and plumped his hairdo. “I’m in charge here,” he shouted, and the truckers nodded and kept dancing and singing their songs about peace, love, and freedom. They also kept blocking little Justin’s roadways. This made him very angry. He couldn’t drop those thousands of truckers and their many supporters, children, and pets, into a tank full of piranhas, as he remembered someone he admired once doing. So he invoked the Emergencies Act, a law framed in the 1980s to provide the government of Canada with extraordinary powers to deal with extraordinary situations: wars, invasions, massive terrorist attacks, that sort of thing.

Trudeau is the first prime minister to invoke that law. That must have put mousse in his coiffure. At last he was first. Legislation such as the Emergencies Act is seldom hauled out and implemented in pacific Canada. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked three times. Once for World War I. Once for World War II. Once for the so-called October Crisis in 1970, when a separatist group called Front de libération du Québec kidnapped a couple of diplomats, including a Quebec provincial cabinet minister who was later murdered.

You might think that a convoy of truckers protesting Canada’s soon-to-be-revoked vaccine mandate did not rise to the level of a world war or even to the level of a terrorist incident. You would be right about that. But to understand what just happened in Canada, it is important to keep two things in mind.

First, the vaccine mandates, which, as I just said, are just about to be revoked, were never more than the pretext for the truckers’ revolt. The real casus belli was the highhandedness of the government in imposing the mandates, along with all the other COVID theater we’ve been treated to: the shutdowns, the masks, the “social (i.e., anti-social) distancing,” the ubiquitous swabs, sanitizers, hand wipes, and general atmosphere of hysteria.

These expedients don’t actually do anything to contain the virus, which is now endemic and markedly less potent than it was when China first shipped it out to the world. On the contrary, they are predominantly ritualistic, almost religious, gestures. The little paper masks, for example, do nothing to “slow the spread” of a virus that can leak like James Comey’s FBI through those porous and baggy fibers.

No, the masks served different functions. Like the yellow stars worn by certain populations in an earlier age, they were in part badges of submission and compliance. Unlike the yellow stars, however, they also have a virtue-signaling function. They say to the world, “See! I declare my greater virtue by wearing this pointless mask, which, among other things, certifies my appreciation of the unprecedented health threat we face and the fact that I care enough about...

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