Intelligence assessment targeting the Freedom Movement gets it wrong

Intelligence assessment targeting the Freedom Movement gets it wrong

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — The Freedom Movement that took shape during the Covid-19 circus risks being spun off into other kinds of activism targeting “perceived tyranny” and “overreach” by governments. That’s the assessment of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) in a report dated April 2023, recently obtained by the Canadian Press under the Freedom of Information Act. Its implications aren’t just limited to Canada, though. The Freedom Movement also loudly resonates in the United States and across the Western world.

Calling government tyranny, particularly in the Covid context that spawned the Freedom Movement, “perceived”, isn’t just an insult to all those whose lives were upended as a result of Covid-related mandates that impacted their basic freedoms of medical choice, work, assembly, and movement. It’s also now proven fake news. Canadian Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled in January 2024 that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to invoke the federal Emergencies Act — historically reserved for terrorism or war — against the Freedom Convoy truckers and supporters denouncing Covid mandates, “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness … and was not justified.”

So the government “tyranny” wasn’t simply perceived, but a matter of actual fact. Of course, the government is appealing the judgment. “The public safety of Canadians was under threat. Our national security, which includes our economic security, was under threat,” said Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Old habits really do die hard. Because there they go treating average citizens like terrorists, again. They seem to think that to implement a crackdown, they just need to fearmonger and evoke the need to protect the general public from some kind of security threat, whether it’s sanitary, economic, or vehicular.

We’re talking here about a move that involved the federal government openly threatening to block bank accounts based on a citizen’s political involvement with the protests. It was later found, in an inquiry conducted by independent commissioner, Justice Paul Rouleau, that the bank account blocking was largely intended to just be a deterrence measure. Oh, thank goodness. Because the difference between the threat and actual execution is … er, what, exactly?

Imagine if every cause for democratic protest could be derailed by some government figure popping out, like from a cuckoo clock, and wielding the vague threat of participants not being able to access their own money. That’s never been done before, so why was this protest treated any differently?

It may have had something to do with all the big rigs that descended on the Canadian capital city of Ottawa, blocking the streets, and convoying across the country, and initially near border crossings. Big vehicles can’t easily be dispersed by water cannons or the kind of tear gas or rubber bullets that literally took out protesters’ eyes during the French Yellow Vest protests against government climate change tyranny that was invoked to extort more fuel tax from average citizens. The tractors that have blocked highways and roads across Western Europe in response to European bureaucratic climate change and pro-Ukrainian trade diktats that are killing traditional family farming have similarly managed to get the ball rolling with at least some initial concessions. And if more aren’t forthcoming soon, they’ve vowed to start rolling again. Big rigs do big jobs — like displacing big government idiocy.

To be fair, CSIS’s brief dates back to April 2023 — several months before the actual court ruling that vindicated the protesters’ cause as legitimate and the government’s actions as actual overreach. So how could they possibly have known what a judge would eventually rule? They’re just an intelligence agency, so it’s not like their job, by definition, involves actual foresight or anything. It’s also not like it wasn’t already public knowledge that their counterparts, intelligence officers of the Canadian Forces, had used the Covid crisis to test military-grade propaganda tactics honed on the battlefield in Afghanistan to manipulate unsuspecting Canadians in favor of the official government narrative, as a Canadian Forces report revealed in 2021.

You’d think that might have been their first clue that government abuse wasn’t all possibly just a figment of citizens’ imaginations.

The CSIS report also warns of Freedom Movement participants “broadening their scope of grievances.” Other observed concerns include “communism” and “15-minute cities” — things that are even less far-fetched than governments simultaneously locking down society, then telling you to get a shot just so you can go to work or to the gym. The report also cites concern over increased domestic control by supranational organizations. What, like the European Union’s climate change policies, concocted by unelected bureaucrats subject to murky financial lobbying pressures, that have been strong- arming farmers into selling their land to the government because their cows make too much waste?

“ Drag [queen] story times and inclusion of material in public school curriculums,” are other Freedom Movement worries, CSIS says. Well, that’s an actual thing now, in Toronto and elsewhere.

“Mass surveillance” is yet another apprehension. Not that governments have done anything to assuage such concerns by rolling out QR codes during Covid, linked to a coordinated system of permanent technological infrastructure, all using health status as a pretext.

Who are the extremists supposed to be, again? Those putting all this into place or those objecting to it? The Freedom Movement doesn’t have a perception problem. Western intelligence services would better serve the citizens that pay their salaries by starting with the premise that it’s the establishment that has an authoritarianism and special interest agenda problem and telling them to knock it off.