Pierre was out to destroy the burgeoning nationalist and working-class movements in Quebec which were often the same thing and were openly socialist. Justin's motives, however, have nothing to do with the left and labour.
In 1970, there were no police, military and intelligence forces openly siding with the FLQ or visibly refusing orders. This is not the case with the Convoy protest.
There is ample evidence demonstrating resistance throughout the ranks of the Ottawa Police to enforcing the law against the protests, to the point where the police chief has resigned and the police board chair was turfed by city council. Relatedly, police forces were unable to acquire the tow trucks needed to dismantle the blockade. The backlash they would have faced from the right-wing business class and Ottawa Valley conservatives would have been swift. Only now are tow trucks being brought in. Their drivers are masked up and the company logos on the vehicles are covered up. You have to wonder how the federal government bribed them. The arrests and towings are happening under a different police leadership, even if Ottawa Police may be doing some of the groundwork (and doing it in such a way as to ensure Tamara Lich has a martyr-style photo of her arrest).
More generally, we know there is one set of laws for Indigenous, labour and left movements and another for right-wing activists. Over the past couple years, we have witnessed so-called police unions across the country actively oppose mask and vaccine mandates. The police have been nowhere in a long series of incidents of right-wingers attacking workers and other people for using masks, and attacking the homes of their political opponents (actual attacks - protesting at people's homes is not the problem). We know of police (and military) being involved in the anti-lockdown/mask/vaccine movement and in the American far right. We know police forces, including Ottawa's, is riddled with far-right goons who will sport various fascistic police logos intended to demonstrate loyalty to a set of politics and likely underground political organizations within police forces.
And of course, it is widely reported that former police, military and intelligence forces were part of the planning and execution of the Convoy. It is likely some of these figures were also active, not simply former or retired security forces. They was also most likely involved as paramilitary security for the Convoy. Many of them were also most likely informants.
This brings us to the problem of who is leading this thing. The top leadership of the Convoy are fascists, some of them openly while the others are fascist in deed (not all fascists wear a swastika on their arm - not all fascists are stupid, and they are capable of learning lessons). However, we know that fascist organizations in Canada are riddled with police informants and spies.
Consider the RCMP arrests of 13 protesters in Alberta loaded with weapons and body armour. The arrests happened a few short hours before Trudeau announced the use of the Emergencies Act. The previous criminal records of those arrested include assault, weapons charges, drug trafficking, and drunk driving. These criminal elements, which typically make-up fascist gangs, are also the very people who are turned into police informants. Some of the 13 arrested were in fact active in fascist organizations, such as Diagolon. Were these arrests made through diligent police work like we see on TV or in the movies, or was this just another case of an opportune series of arrests based on a continuing intelligence operation? Might it have even been a trap? Anyone familiar with the RCMP's history of dirty tricks - like bombing Alberta oil wells, spying on countless organizations, or likely setting up the Giant Mine bombing - knows damn well this is all quite plausible. The timing of the arrest and its significance in justifying the Emergencies Act is highly suspect.
The point is that the RCMP and CSIS have known what is going on for quite some time. The claim that CSIS and the RCMP was caught off guard by this protest is 100% bullshit. It will eventually come out that RCMP, CSIS, senior civil servants, and Trudeau's inner circle were aware of and briefed as the Convoy was being plotted.
Furthermore, there are good odds that certain aspects and tactics of the protest were in fact orchestrated by informants and active-duty police, military and intelligence within this far-right movement. This was true of the Heritage Front in the 1990s, and has been true of many so-called Islamic terror cells in Canada. Also, consider the top leader of the Proud Boys in the United States was an FBI asset who was "arrested" two days before the January 6 Capitol Hill Riot.
What does this all mean? Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act likely serves two main purposes.
First, it is an assertion of authority over the capital and the demotion of the Ottawa Police as the leading force in the dismantling of the Convoy. The Ottawa Police are effectively decapitated - Sloly's resignation was also very timely - requiring other police forces to take command. To put it another way that trade unionists can understand, if the Ottawa Police were conducting a job action, Trudeau sent in a ton of scabs to break them.
Second, the powers over financial transactions and accounts will afford the Liberals and their allies in the federal bureaucracy the information to identify and map out various opposition forces, and begin to open up new points of pressure and attack. It is not simply a means of cutting off funds, since this was partially successful without the Emergencies Act. As with the fall-out from the Capitol Hill Riot, there will be months of revelations about who is involved. Everything from CRA audits to various criminal charges, such as fraud, are coming for a whole lot of middling elements and a few big fish they can make examples of. The Liberals will press a counter-attack on their hard right opposition in federal parliament and in various provincial offices. That, or their inner weakness will be exposed if perpetrators are let off the hook.
These methods of financially strangling enemies are not new. They are an imperialist tool that can cripple a dictator or facilitate genocide. They are also tools of domestic repression and they have been used widely against the left and especially labour. The Emergencies Act became law in 1988, only a year after Mulroney's strikebreaking laws against postal workers attached outrageous financial penalties to defiance. Arresting union leaders had failed in the late 1970s. Nuking unions and destroying individual union members through financial penalties became the new method.
There is no mass of protesters trashing Parliament. There are no guns drawn at the Ambassador Bridge. There are no bulldozers plowing aside blockades on the 49th parallel. The crisis is not dramatic in televisual or Hollywood terms, but it is a crisis nonetheless. It is a sign that the pandemic has deepened chasms within the ruling class, corroded the loyalties of armed forces, and give rise to a new far-right that has become the most dynamic element in Canadian politics. Their intervention has toppled O'Toole and has weakened Trudeau to the point that he has turned to the Emergencies Act to spearhead a political counter-attack. This is an emerging crisis of rule among elites with fascist elements well in advance of labour and the left in terms of organizing a response.
With the role of union leaders and an NDP MPP spiking an earlier counter-protest in Ottawa and the NDP backing the Emergencies Act, it is self-evident that the labour bureaucracy and NDP have been subsumed into the neoliberal progressive side of this broad polarization between elite blocs. Anyone who takes a sober look at the past 30 years can see this at work. The NDP long ago accepted permanent austerity and neoliberalism, and most union bureaucracies followed suit. The NDP's role in this pandemic has been to prop up the Liberals, from their corrupt wage subsidy program to their atrocious paid sick days program, and now the Emergencies Act.
We have no left despite the fact we need a new left for self-defence against rising fascism outside AND inside the state, and, more importantly, for advancing a democratic alternative to the deepening war among ruling elites on how best to rule and exploit the people and land in this elite project called Canada.