If you have ever watched the movie Whose Life Is it, Anyway?, you will know it is about a man who wants the right to die owing to his quadriplegia. Sovereignty over his body is the issue, and he goes to trial to have the right to choose. He ultimately prevails in claiming that right.

I can’t help but see some parallels between that movie and the question of our own national sovereignty. As I have recently written, each concession or act of appeasement by the Carney government is yet another diminishment of our national freedom of choice, whether it be on bridge tolls or the cowardly silence on Canadian ICJ Kimberly Prost’s fight against the sanctions the Americans imposed on her. Such timidity is, in my view, a national embarrassment and does nothing but invite more abuse from the mad king ruling the U.S.

There now appears to be a new issue upon which Canada refuses to speak, and it has to do with Trump’s ideological war against anyone who dares oppose him:

 The Trump administration is hosting a high-level global meeting on combating “political terrorism” in Washington on Thursday, as it tries to rally together allies on its plans to crack down on left-wing movements.

All we know thus far is that neither Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand (“prior engagements”) nor Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree are attending. 

The political motivation of the ‘summit’ is obvious:

The meeting comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on what it describes as a rising trend of left-wing extremist violence, with officials focusing on “Antifa,” despite the fact it is not a single, organized group.

A White House counterterrorism strategy released in May names “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” as one of three major terror threats alongside “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs” and “legacy Islamist terrorists.” 

“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national (counterterrorism) activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the 16-page document notes.

Phil Gurski, a former analyst for the Canadian security Intelligence Service, makes these observation:

  “The most remarkable thing was there was nary a mention of the far-right. It completely disappeared. And if you look at any other sane, informed, justified threat assessment of political violence/terrorism in the United States, I mean the far-right is right up there,” Gurski said of the Americans’ counterterrorism strategy.

“To say that the far-left constitutes a significant national security threat in the United States, that’s complete bulls—t, based on the data that I’ve seen,” Gurski said. “To me, this is one more attempt by the Trump administration to sell this agenda, that you know, there’s nothing to see here, folks from the far-right.” 

Now, it can be reasonably argue that one doesn’t want to provoke the beast, but citizens are not even allowed to know if there will be a Canadian presence at the gathering. And based on past performance, that in itself is ominous.

Gurski said Canada and the U.S. already share a lot of intelligence, but he’s concerned about Trump officials pressuring Canada to add left-wing groups to its designated terror list.

Already, he pointed out, Canada followed suit on the Trump administration’s moves to list Latin American cartels as terror groups, even though they’re typically treated as organized criminal organizations instead.

“If someone commits a criminal act, you can prosecute them for that, but pressuring us to list something like Antifa a terrorist group, just would not fly very well under our legislation as written,” added [Stephanie] Carvin [a professor at Carleton University and a former national security analyst for the federal government.]

 Significantly, during a meeting in Ottawa with senior officials in March, as reported in The New York Times, 

Monica A. Jacobsen … told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

Canada once had a proud foreign policy, one that did not bow to the caprices of the elephant to the south. Increasing, the Carney government is abandoning that independence in order to chase the illusory dream of peace with the U.S. Based on everything we have seen thus far, that ‘strategy’ is doomed to failure, and is another significant blow to our national stature and pride.