Police fear American insurgents with guns to infiltrate Ottawa protest

That enticing nugget of speculation can be found in the pages of the Globe and Mail today (Gary Mason p 15), so you may wish to take it with a pound of salt or two.

The thought leaders at the Globe have been mightily indignant since before the convoy left Vancouver. After all, according to them, vaccine hesitancy has always been a symptom of racism and white supremacy. When Black Lives Matter declares vaccine mandates racist, the blinkered nabobs at the Globe stay silent.

PM Fluffy, meanwhile, is doubling down on his campaign of relentless vilification of the protesters. His handlers are under the impression this is a vote-winning strategy. When, two years into this pandemic, Trudeau can still stand there and talk about the only way out is getting more people vaccinated, he's definitely not got science on his side.

"Safe" and "effective" are relative terms, of course. We're among the leading nations in terms of vaccine uptake, and we've got more covid, more hospitalizations, and more deaths than ever. Does that really strike you as a sound basis for a mandatory vaccination policy?

The folks in those trucks don't thinks so.

It is our patriotic duty to hate China

The Globe and Mail leads off today's orgy of China bashing with this headline; "Canada, allies condemn China's security law over Hong Kong."

Yup, Canada and "our allies," in this case consisting of the US, UK, and Australia. That's a pretty small club of allies, clearly led not by Canada, but by Washington. This is why the anti-China rhetoric we find in the Globe is indistinguishable from that found on Fox News. Canadian media give US propaganda a Canadian spin by pretending that we're "leading" this alliance, when in reality we are meekly following Washington, as are the UK and Australia.

The lead story is followed up with a trifecta of anti-China rants on the opinion page.

Gary Mason makes this observation; "China's despicable conduct in Hong Kong has only fortified the resentment Canadians hold toward a cruel and treacherous regime that is increasingly a menace to the world."

As Gary Mason himself and anyone who follows these matters knows, it is the US and not China that is consistently, in poll after worldwide poll, fingered as the leading menace to the world.

If you think Mason's harrumphing is over the top, get a load of the whopper Lynette Ong uncorks on the same page; "In the past three decades, the world has enjoyed relative safety in no small part to US-led unipolarity, and the resulting Western alliance that champions democracy and liberal values."

Indeed! In the last thirty years the US-led Western alliance has bestowed democracy and liberal values on Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

With that thirty-year track record of success behind us, it's about time we tackled China! No doubt the Chinese people are clamouring for a taste of "relative safety" too, and will welcome any intervention by the Western allies in the name of democracy and liberal values!

What a joke.

Censorship by omission

Gary Mason has a scary op-ed on A5 of today's Globe on Canada's troubles with China.

To hear Mason tell the tale, little rule-of-law Canada was diligently following the rule of law when Uncle Sam sent over an extradition request for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. Being the rule-of-law nebbishes that we are, we of course immediately acquiesced to the American request, because... well, rule of law, don't ya know!

So now we're being bullied by the cowardly Chinese, who bully us because they fear the actual real bully in the schoolyard, Uncle Sam.

While Mason has a point about who the real bully is in this scenario, he says not a word about the foundational issue behind this controversy, ie the alleged crimes committed by Meng. According to Washington's interpretation of "rule of law," they get to make up laws unilaterally and can then prosecute anyone on the planet for violating them. In this case, they claim that Meng's employer, a Chinese company, violated US law by doing business with Iran, contrary to US sanctions.

This is an aspect of the case seldom mentioned in the Globe and Mail's many stories on the matter; the legality and morality of the American sanctions on Iran. It is blithely assumed that it's 100% hunky-dory for the Trump regime to make stuff up and expect the rest of the world to cave to its demands, and watch out if they don't!

Folks who fail to fall in line are at risk of being apprehended at a Canadian airport, because in Canada, we're all about the rule of law.