Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hello and welcome to columnist Ella Wheeler

Hello and spiked columnist Ella Wheeling.

Hi.

Coming up on the show Canada's's Freedom Convoy, the crisis in Ukraine, the EU's assault on Poland and Hungary,

and the Tory war on Woke. So this week at the beginning this week Justin Trudeau launched a serious

crackdown on the Canadian Freedom convoy he used some extraordinary emergency powers to essentially

treat these protesters as terrorists more or less. Tom, you've been following this story quite closely.

What have you made of it?

We just sort of poured kerosene on the fire and made such dramatic and authoritarian intervention.

They're even following where Trudeau has been going during the pandemic and during this particular

protests and this particular crisis I think was surprising to a lot of people.

So as you say you invoked this emergency act.

For the first time in its kind of current form as far as I understand it,

allowing all sorts of different measures to be implemented to try and bring the protesters to heal

so banks can now freeze accounts linked to the protesters without even having to get a court order.

The police have given more powers to fine and to arrest protesters, particularly the more disruptive ones.

And there's also been discussions about again kind of further restricting how they can get

funds and this being part of the kind of broadening of their funding of terrorist activities.

This is really incredibly extreme stuff and it was what I think one of the things that was so striking about it even though we sort of know this and we've been talking about this a long time it's just how incredibly

authoritarian these kind of centrist technocrats are and how much of a free pass they get

from the kind of international liberal human rights set I mean there's been barely a whimper of

protest certainly not from other Western leaders when this is a remarkable escalation I mean to

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