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To be sure, many people are reverting to type in this crisis. Amnesty International said controlling illegal immigration was illegal. Climate alarmists hailed COVID-19 as a model for fighting global warming. The foreign minister phoned other foreign ministers to say they should phone each other. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh demanded a “firing freeze.” And Trudeau said burn Magna Carta.

We need free societies’ habit of maintaining dissent in crises. John Robson

If it’s also typical that I want intelligent scrutiny of the state in an emergency, my type beats Trudeau’s. He always considered democratic procedures a permissible luxury in calm periods but a frivolous indulgence in crises when we need a real man leading us.

It’s an understandable reflex. Get with the program. Don’t you know there’s a war on? Dissent is treason. Burn the witch.

John Ivison called COVID-19 Trudeau’s make or break moment, where stone-faced “resolve” in barking “enough is enough” might erase the genial doofus public image. Oh great. Napoleon to the rescue. Just what we need.

No. We need free societies’ habit of maintaining dissent in crises. Not always perfectly, to our subsequent shame. But as I noted in a recent Loonie Politics column, a very public munitions crisis toppled a British prime minister during the First World War and rightly. And if Trudeau makes a mess of this pandemic, he should be ousted. Exactly unlike Xi Jinping.

Photo by Xie Huanchi/Xinhua

Indeed, the Chinese government’s performance on COVID-19 has been a revealing model of disastrous mendacity. They denied anything was happening, imprisoned critics and let the virus loose on the world while everyone from the World Health Organization to our health minister licked their jackboots. Now they’re lying about stopping it dead, and people still believe them. The New York Times told the U.S. to “repeat the success of countries like China … in containing the epidemic,” the same day the Epoch Times published leaked documents showing many new cases.