Trudeau slammed for accusing Jewish Conservative MP of standing ‘with people who wave swastikas’

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked anger on Wednesday when he accused a Jewish MP of ‘standing with people who wave swastikas’ after she criticized his handling of the Freedom Convoy truckers’ anti-vaccine protests.

Melissa Lantsman, a 37-year-old Conservative MP for the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, confronted the prime minister in parliament about the draconian Emergency Act, which he invoked on Monday for the first time in 50 years in a bid to end 19 days of chaos.

Trudeau responded with scorn to her complaints, saying: ‘Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas, they can stand with people who wave the confederate flag. 

‘We will chose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, and get their lives back. These illegal protests need to stop and they will.’

His comments were greeted with uproar, and forced the Speaker of the House to reprimand Trudeau and others, reminding them of rules against using ‘inflammatory’ language in parliament during the debates.

After being reprimanded, Trudeau refused to apologize and again repeated that the blockades were illegal, and the measures to repress the protests were necessary. 

Lantsman later tweeted: ‘I think the Prime Minister should think long and hard about his own history before singling out a Jewish Member of Parliament and falsely accusing me of standing with a Swastika.

‘What a disgraceful statement unbecoming of anyone in public office – he owes me an apology.’   

Lantsman had earlier quoted Trudeau’s October 2015 victory speech, when he was elected prime minister.

‘A positive, optimistic, hopeful vision of public life isn’t a naive dream; it can be a powerful force for change,’ Lantsman quoted.

‘If Canadians are to trust their government, their government needs to trust Canadians,’ she quoted.

Lantsman added: ‘Those are the words of the prime minister in 2015.

‘ “These people – very often misogynistic, racist, women hater, science deniers, the fringe,” – same prime minister, six years later, as he fans the flames of an unjustified national emergency.

‘So, Mr Speaker, when did the prime minister lose his way? When did it happen?’ 

Trudeau said that his government was ‘following to the letter’ the Emergency Act, and it was needed.

Dane Lloyd, an MP for Sturgeon River in Alberta, accused Trudeau of making ‘shameful and dishonorable’ remarks.

He added: ‘For the prime minister to accuse any colleague in this house of standing with the swastika is shameful.’

Lloyd called on Trudeau to ‘unreservedly apologize’ – and Trudeau refused.

He countered: ‘Canadians deserve their freedoms back.

‘These illegal blockades that continue to interfere with people’s daily lives.’

Amid the catcalls, the Speaker intervened to ‘ask everybody to calm down’.

Trudeau continued: ‘The measure put forward are proportionate, responsible and completely folded into charter of freedoms. These steps are proportionate.’

Lloyd replied that the ‘lack of apology speaks volumes’ and urged Trudeau again to apologize.

Trudeau said: ‘These members continue to stand with illegal blockades. Canadians are watching carefully and … we will stand will stand on the side of Canadians who want their livelihoods back.’

For a third time, Lloyd demanded: ‘Mr Prime Minister, apologize.’

And Trudeau said: ‘These illegal blockades have been going on in Ottawa for 20 days now.

‘People are made to feel fearful, miss shifts at their work, these are things that cannot be stood for.

‘That’s why we are moving forward with measures. We continue to defend freedom of expression, freedom to protest, as long as they are peaceful.’

Candice Bergen, the opposition leader, told Trudeau that the threshold for invoking the Emergency Act had not been met – pointing out that the three bridges into the United States have now been cleared.

‘It’s not something done lightly,’ Trudeau replied.

‘It was necessary to give local law enforcement the tools to lift these illegal blockades, to ensure law and safety and to ensure Canadians are able to get back to their daily lives.’

Bergen accused Trudeau of overreach.

‘Why is the prime minister using this hammer on Canadians?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t it true that he’s using it just to save his own political skin?’

Trudeau insisted that the threshold had been met, adding: ‘Now across the country, police have the tools necessary to keep people safe.’

Bergen accused Trudeau of ‘admiring dictatorships’.

She continued: ‘He is pouring gasoline on embers. Isn’t it true that he is doing it for one reason, and one reason alone: to save his own political career.’

Trudeau hit back: ‘Conservatives can’t have it both ways.

‘They spent weeks complaining, saying the government needed to act and take responsibility – and when we finally moved forward, in a responsible way, when the time is right, to bring about the Emergency Act, they are now criticizing it.’

He said that ‘they are the ones playing politics’.

Bergen said that the mandates must end, saying that continued lockdowns were harming the mental health of the country.

Trudeau insisted that his government was following the science, adding: ‘The 90 percent vaccination rate shows that Canadians have never been more united.

‘There have been people harassing frontline workers, and illegal blockades, but the majority have been supporting each other.’

And he added: ‘We all want to get through it. The way to get through it is by following science, by keeping each other safe. The way through pandemic is not by supporting illegal blockades.’

Trudeau has stepped up his crackdown on Freedom Convoy demonstrators, with police now visiting the homes of people who post in support of the protests on Facebook and a woman forced out of her government job after donating to the demonstrations. 

Trudeau on Wednesday was considering using his extraordinary powers under the Emergencies Act to establish ‘no-go’ zones in Ottawa to dispel the remaining protests in the nation’s capital.

Ottawa police fanned out among the demonstrators on Wednesday afternoon, distributing pamphlets saying protesters faced fines, arrests and vehicle seizures, and reading: ‘You must leave the area now’. 

As the blockades in Alberta and Manitoba ended peacefully, all focus came to bear on the protest in Ottawa, now in its third week, with demonstrators paralyzing the streets over their demand for an end to vaccine mandates.  

Frustration with the failure of Canadian police to lift blockades at the border and in the capital, along with scenes of protesters lounging in hot tubs near Parliament, ultimately drove Trudeau to seek emergency powers earlier this week, sources told Reuters. 

Trudeau has been slammed by critics who accuse him of imposing ‘martial law’ to crush the protests over vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, appearing to buckle under pressure after weeks of sustained protests, this week announced an end to COVID restrictions and seemed to echo the message of the protesters opposed to pandemic mandates, saying of capacity limits: ‘Let’s just start moving on, cautiously. The world’s done with it, let’s just move forward.’  

But in a crackdown on the protests, an Ontario Provincial Police officer knocked on the door of Nadine Ellis-Maffei’s farmhouse last week to hand her a card and a pamphlet after seeing her post her post to the Freedom Convoy’s Facebook group, video of the incident shows.

Ellis-Maffei said in the post that she was considering attending the protest in Ottawa. She said she had not been part of any demonstrations at this point.  

‘Because of the protests happening province wide, yes we have been monitoring the protest. So there’s a protest coming up, I’m simply providing information about a peaceful protest,’ the officer said in the video taken last Thursday by Ellis-Maffei.

‘I was flabbergasted,’ said the mother of three, who operates a farm in Ontario’s Peterborough County.

She told the Toronto Sun: ‘I still can’t believe it.’

Ellis-Maffei compared the incident to the ‘thought police and Big Brother’ from the dystopian novel 1984. 

Meanwhile, an Ontario provincial staffer has been forced out of her job after hackers revealed that she donated $100 to the Freedom Convoy protests earlier this month.

Marion Isabeau Ringuette, who was Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones’s director of communications, lost her job 10 days after making the donation, according to the Toronto Star. 

After the donor list to a GiveSendGo campaign supporting the protests was stolen and leaked by hackers this week, Isabeau-Ringuette’s identity was apparently deciphered and reported to her employer, although she only used her initials when making the donation. 

‘Ms. Isabeau-Ringuette no longer works for the Ontario government,’ Ivana Yelich, Ford’s executive director of media relations, told the Star.

‘We’re not commenting any further as this is a staffing matter.’ 

Isabeau-Ringuette did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Tuesday.  

The local news outlet QP Briefing said that it had ‘brought the information to the attention of Isabeau-Ringuette and Premier Doug Ford’s office late Tuesday afternoon’ as Canadian journalists scour the hacked list for donor names and out them to employers. Specifically, the country’s national broadcaster, Canadian Broadcasting Company, has gone through the list to contact and publicly out donors.  

It revealed that the former leader of the country’s Progressive Conservative Party, Ches Crosbie, made an $800 donation. 

He was unapologetic when confronted by CBC journalists, saying: ‘Indefinite states of emergency, such as we are under in most of Canada, are a dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. I support the right of peaceful protest and I see the Freedom Convoy as a peaceful protest.’

The CBC also outed a prominent business owner in London, Ontario, as giving the largest single donation to the Freedom Convoy. 

Holden Rhodes, who owns Killarney Mountain Lodge, donated $25,000. 

He was just as unapologetic after being outed by the CBC, telling journalists: ‘The overreach on the last two years has been astounding, but in the last two weeks in Canada it has been absolutely alarming for anyone believes in a peaceful and free society,’ he said. 

‘Government at all levels has to realize they are elected to represent the people of Canada rather than lock up and threaten to arrest people for exercising their legal rights of peaceful protest.’

Another donor outed in the leak was Tammy Giuliani, owner of Stella Luna Gelato Cafe in Ottawa, who was forced to shut down her business after she received an onslaught of threats over her $250 donation. 

It’s not clear whether she was outed by journalists scouring the data, but her name has appeared online as part of the leak of the hack after she wrote a post on a GiveSendGo message board.  

‘We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,’ Giuliani told the Ottawa Citizen. 

‘I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.’ 

‘We said, ‘Lock the door and we’ll find out what’s going on.’

The executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, said Trudeau’s ’emergency’ order dangerously bypassed the democratic process.

‘Difficult situations, challenging situations happen all the time. Governments have the tools to deal with them, and the emergency powers are much too large power, that bypasses the democratic process,’ said Aviv in an interview with Fox News. 

The founder of GiveSendGo, Jacob Wells, has called for the FBI to investigate the illegal hack and to hunt down the hackers who have shared private citizens’ information online.  

‘This seems well orchestrated. There’s strong political motivations behind this,’ he told Fox News. 

Wells also slammed Trudeau’s government for ‘instilling terror’ over peaceful protesters. 

In a press conference on Wednesday, three organizers of the Freedom Convoy called for more Canadians to join their protest in Ottawa. 

‘We want the restoration of our fundamental right to peaceful protest. All Canadians should be surprised, no matter your political opinions, that the federal government has resorted to such extreme measures as the Emergency Act and that the government wants to use force on peaceful demonstration,’ he said.

‘We call on our fellow Canadians to come to Ottawa to exercise their legal right to assemble and protest peacefully. The more Canadians that come to Ottawa will make it hard for the government to get the police to follow their illegal order.’ 

Meanwhile, four suspects face serious charges of allegedly plotting to murder police officers in connection with a trove of firearms that were seized at the Freedom Convoy border blockade in Coutts, Alberta – though the city’s mayor claims they are all ‘outsiders’ who were not part of the broader protest against vaccine mandates. 

Chris Carbert, 44; Christopher Lysak, 48; Anthony Olienick, 39; and Jerry Morin, 40, were arrested on Monday and charged with possession of weapons for a dangerous purpose, mischief, and conspiracy to commit murder.

The allegations are in connection with the trove of weapons seized in a police raid on raid on two camper trailers and a mobile home on 1st Avenue North in Coutts – a property near the border crossing but not part of the actual blockade. 

The mayor of Coutts told DailyMail.com that those arrested were not members of the Freedom Convoy, despite them being initially tied to the ongoing anti-vaccine protests. 

‘The people who were actually involved in the arrests were not part of the blockade group,’ Mayor Jim Willett said. ‘They were outsiders.’ 

The mayor described the individuals as outside agitators who came to town after the protest began.

‘As time went on, the protest began to attract people from the outside,’ he said. 

‘They were starting to attract the undesirable element. The people who were actually involved in the arrests were not part of the blockade group. They were outsiders.’

Police themselves say that the individuals charged were a ‘small organized group within the larger Coutts protest’ and a ‘small segment of the protest’ with a ‘militant mindset’. 

One of the four charged with plotting to kill Mounties in Alberta, Lysak, has ties to a right-wing Canadian movement dubbed ‘Diagolon’ and faces an additional charge of uttering threats.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network dubs Diagolon ‘a network of far-right accelerationist survivalists’ and says that Lysak was once called the ‘head of security for Diagolon’. 

Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who podcasts under the moniker ‘Raging Dissident’, issued a video statement in response to images showing the symbol of his movement on body armor seized in the Coutts raid, in which 13 long guns and multiple handguns were recovered by Mounties.

‘I have no idea where those came from, who those belong to, who put them there, who brought them there – did the police put them there?’ said MacKenzie of the Diagolon symbol, a diagonal white band on a black field. 

MacKenzie claims his movement was conceived as a joke while ‘pretty stoned on edible marijuana’ and that the name and symbol represent a diagonal swathe from Alaska to Florida, across Canada and the US, of states and provinces that oppose mandates and other pandemic restrictions.

Facing lesser charges in connection with the Coutts raid are Luke Berk, 62; Joanne Person, 62; Johnson Law, 39; Jaclyne Martin, 39; Evan Colenutt, 23; Ursula Allred, 22; Justin Martin, 22; Eastin Stewart Oler, 22; and Janx Zaremba, 18. 

They are charged with mischief and unlawful weapons offenses in relation to the blockade, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 

‘Monday’s weapons seizure and subsequent arrests speak to the serious criminal activities taking place during this protest and illegal blockade,’ said RCMP Deputy Commissioner Curtis Zablock in a statement.

‘The dangerous, criminal activity occurring away from the TV cameras and social media posts was real and organized, and it could have been deadly for citizens, protesters and officers,’ he added. 

Meanwhile, following the resignation of Ottawa’s police chief, Trudeau’s government is considering imposing ‘no-go’ zones in the nation’s capital using special powers under the Emergencies Act. 

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said at a news conference that the action could include declaring ‘certain zones that are adjacent to critical infrastructure like borders, like our national symbols including legislatures, like war monuments … as a no-go zone,’

The Freedom Convoy, a trucker-led movement calling on the government to lift vaccine mandates, is largely based in Ottawa, where parts of the country’s capital city have been occupied by protestors since late January.

The convoy also blocked US border crossings, including a key trade route into Detroit that was cleared by police last weekend. 

Controversy surrounding how police have managed the protests on Ottawa prompted the abrupt resignation of Police Chief Peter Sloly on Tuesday. 

He  stepped down after being criticized for not doing enough to stop the unruly protests, which prompted Trudeau to invoke emergency powers on Monday.

Ottawa police did not respond to a request for comment, and Trudeau’s public safety minister said the government had no role in his decision to resign.

Trudeau on Monday invoked the little-used Emergencies Act, signaling the federal government was taking control of a situation local and provincial police have struggled to resolve as protests against pandemic restrictions dragged on.

Discussions on invoking the rarely used powers first began on Thursday as the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge, a key U.S.-Canada trade artery between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, entered its third day, two sources, who are familiar with the discussions, told Reuters.

‘The Windsor police kind of let it happen,’ one of the sources said. All requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. Windsor police asked for more resources, which the province provided.

The bridge blockade led to the temporary shutdown of several car plants before police finally cleared it on Sunday after six days, and after a concerned call from U.S. President Joe Biden to Trudeau.

Meanwhile, protesters who had paralyzed parts of Ottawa since Jan. 28 were getting more entrenched, and there was growing concern about the presence of ‘nefarious elements’ among the protesters. Police in Alberta later seized guns and ammunition from a group linked to a border protest.

‘The prime minister was quite mad,’ said a government source, referring to a Thursday meeting of the federal Incident Response Group, made up of Trudeau’s top advisers. 

‘He said we need to get out in front of this.’

‘He was demanding solutions’ at the meeting, a third source familiar with the matter said, adding Trudeau was saying: ‘Let’s put everything on the table and say, what are the good ideas here?’

The third source said the government realized last week that ‘enforcement wasn’t happening’ after initially waiting to see how provincial authorities and local police responded.

‘He also needed to know fully that … we have given it enough time for it to work or not work, or partially work, and think about what more we need to do,’ the source said. 

‘He didn’t want to jump ahead of things that were happening.’

Ottawa police initially said their objective was to de-escalate. Later they asked both the provincial and federal governments for more resources, saying they were outnumbered.

The addition of chaotic scenes from Ottawa on the weekend, including hundreds of residents turning out to block another convoy from joining the protesters, proved too much, two of the sources said.

Police stood by as protesters bathed in a hot tub and partied into the night directly in front of parliament and below the prime minister’s office.

‘This past weekend in Ottawa really drove some people over the edge, the hot tub, the stage, and … the impotence of the police to do something about it,’ the source said.

Police chief Peter Sloly resigned on Tuesday amid criticism of his force’s performance.

The Ottawa protest involves some 360 trucks and vehicles, several hundred protesters, and a large cache of funds from donors in the United States and Canada.

‘If you’re asking for one factor, it was Ottawa … the Ottawa situation is completely out of control. We just went through a third weekend of no enforcement,’ said the second source.

Concerns that protesters may re-occupy border crossings and disrupt crucial trade flows with the United States and affect publicly safety also factored into the decision, the sources said.

Another factor was the specter of violence when police in Alberta on Monday arrested 11 people and seized guns and ammunition.

‘There are organized nefarious elements that are involved with these things,’ said the second source, citing the Alberta gun seizure.

‘There’s an element here that is … trying to subvert the normal course of our democracy, which has to be protected, regardless of who’s the government,’ the third source said.

‘That’s really the difference between this and other protests that we’ve seen.’

Seven of the 11 people arrested were released Tuesday without having to post bail following virtual hearings at a provincial court in Lethbridge, Alberta, while the four facing more serious charges are being held pending bail hearings on Friday.

‘The people who weren’t charged with conspiracy to commit murder got released on consent,’ defense lawyer Yoav Niv, whose firm is representing several of the accused, told DailyMail.com

He wouldn’t comment on specifics of the case, other than to say, ‘Everyone’s presumed innocent until proven guilty.’ 

Calgary resident Johnson Chichow Law, who was one of those arrested on lesser charges, looks after his two young daughters full-time and is a hard worker, a friend told DailyMail.com on Tuesday.

‘I’m honestly shocked by this news,’ said his friend, who requested to remain anonymous given the contentiousness of the protests. 

Joanne Person, also arrested on the lesser charges, posted about her ordeal on a Facebook chat group for the Coutts protesters.

‘Go help us,’ she wrote, omitting the last letter of ‘God.’

‘The full tactical is at my home and they are teloing (sic) us to leave the home and that they are entering. My god. Please help us.

‘They are threating (sic) me. I fear for our lives,’ she added.