(LifeSiteNews) — As millions of Americans react to the shocking news that beloved Fox News host Tucker Carlson is parting ways with the media outlet, Canadians are reminded of the numerous times the well-known conservative commentator took aim at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Like the majority of American political commentators, Carlson paid little to no attention to his northern neighbors or their leadership throughout his primetime Tucker Carlson Tonight show’s near seven-year run.
However, when the COVID-19 so-called pandemic began to take hold in 2020, and the Trudeau government became internationally recognized for its harsh response, Carlson was quick to highlight the unprecedented actions taken by the prime minister.
Canada’s COVID camps violate ‘the most basic human rights’
In March 2021 is when Carlson really began his major onslaught against Trudeau, telling Americans coast to coast about the nation’s mandatory COVID quarantine policy, which saw Canadians returning to the country from abroad being ushered into “designated facilities” the host called “internment camps” if they tested positive for the coronavirus.
“What if your next-door neighbor suddenly went dangerously insane and started holding people hostage in his house?” Carlson asked in the opening part of his monologue.
“Canada, the land mass directly to our north and our single largest trading partner, with whom we share the longest international border in the world, took a dramatic move towards legitimately dangerous authoritarianism,” he continued at the time. “Yes, Canada.”
Pulling no punches, Carlson continued, “Trudeau’s internment policy has been in place since last month, and as far as we can tell, no major U.S. news network has mentioned it.”
“Neither has our State Department, which ordinarily seems to exist to make unhappy noises about human rights violations around the world,” he continued.
“Suddenly, Canada is a flagrant violator of the most basic human rights,” Carlson added. “Fail a COVID test and they’ll lock you up without a trial.”
Carlson and the ‘political repression’ of Canada’s COVID dissenters
Arguably where Carlson most frequently took aim at the Trudeau government was not in its response to the COVID virus itself but in its response to those Canadians who publicly defied his government’s pandemic diktats.
Also in March 2021, after Canadian pastor James Coates was jailed for holding church services during the COVID lockdowns, Carlson invited his wife Erin onto the program to discuss just how little liberty was left in the mild-mannered country.
“Well, I think there’s been a war, like a boiling frog for a while, I think our freedoms have just been slowly stripped from us and, so slowly over time that we didn’t even realize it, and so when something like health order is put in place, that takes away your freedoms, it’s not shocking to people. And it really should be shocking to people that there is a pastor in jail right now who’s given his life to sacrifice and love other people to worship God,” Coates had told the Fox News host.
“That’s not shocking to a lot of people — and it really should be. We are on a dangerous road right now. And I think because we’ve just been in the pot for so long boiling that people aren’t really realizing the danger that we’re facing as a nation.”
In June 2021, after the leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) Maxime Bernier was arrested for protesting COVID lockdowns, Carlson also invited the pro-freedom politician onto his program to further explain just how restricted freedom was becoming under Trudeau.
“In Canada, you cannot speak against the regime. It’s like in China. I was in jail for eight hours a day – they handcuffed me, put me in jail and for a non-crime … it was a political repression,” Bernier told Carlson at the time.
Carlson responded by saying that “it’s remarkable the government would arrest its political opponent for complaining about its policies.”
Carlson and the Canadian COVID convoy
For many Canadians, Carlson’s most impactful segments on the oft-forgotten country came during the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy, which saw hundreds of trucks and thousands of citizens clog the nation’s capital for weeks on end in protest of the Trudeau government.
In his first segment on the trucker convoy, in late January 2022, Carlson blasted Trudeau as a “despot” for refusing to meet with the truckers and said that COVID mandates have turned Canada into a “surveillance state.”
“Over the span of just a few years, Trudeau has turned a nation long famous for Molson and sled dogs and niceness into a relentlessly punitive surveillance state,” the news host ripped. “Trudeau has used, systematically, COVID to short-circuit democracy in Canada and to end organized Christianity there.”
“A convoy of truckers converged on the capital city of Ottawa to demand — peacefully, cheerfully, but persistently — an end to Justin Trudeau’s tyranny,” Carlson continued.
“Justin Trudeau’s response to this display of democracy? He fled the city. Trudeau evacuated his official residence and hid in an undisclosed location. He is still cowering there tonight. Will he come back? Has he abdicated? Will Canada be ruled by a junta of truckers? Well, not at this point. He emerged by video conference from his lair to declare that Canadian citizens who disagree with him are in fact attacking democracy.”
Trudeau uses the Emergencies Act to invoke a ‘dictatorship’
Just weeks later, on February 14, Carlson dedicated the bulk of his program to Trudeau, after the prime minister invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act on the aforementioned Freedom Convoy truckers, shutting down their bank accounts and forcibly removing them from the city of Ottawa.
“What’s happening in Canada now is not an emergency,” Carlson explained before playing a clip from Ottawa of protesters dancing and singing. “According to Justin Trudeau, everyone you saw in that tape is a terrorist … even the kids in their bouncy caps.”
“Justin Trudeau revoked their civil liberties and authorized men with weapons to haul them to jail,” Carlson added.
Showing a man offering free meals to passers-by and protesters in Ottawa, he pointed out how “all of those people can now be arrested on site, simply because of where they’re standing, but being arrested is the least of their problems.”
“An arrest suggests bail — you can get out of jail. You can’t get out of the country Justin Trudeau has just made,” Tucker remarked. “Under martial law, Trudeau now has the power to force banks to seize their bank accounts and insurance companies to cancel their insurance.”
“That means they can’t actually live in Canada anymore — they are non-persons, they’re enemies of the state and they will be crushed.”
‘If you’re going to remain God, you’re going to need a devil to fight’
After the Freedom Convoy came to an end, and Canada finally saw the beginning of the end of the COVID-era, Carlson continued on the offensive against Trudeau, warning his audience that tyranny still loomed.
“You’ve got to feel a little bad for the many heads of Western democracies, for them, the end of the coronavirus pandemic is really the worst thing they can imagine,” Carlson stated in late February 2022.
“Put yourself in their position: for two years you’ve wielded unprecedented power over your country. You’ve told citizens where and when they can work, shop, worship, go outside. You’ve controlled what they wear, decided how their children will be educated, and what drugs they must put into their bodies. For a person with no useful skills and limited job prospects in the real economy, and that describes all of them, it has been an extraordinary experience,” Carlson continued.
He likened civil leaders’ newfound powers to the power of God and stated that the last thing the leaders want is for their reign of limitless power to end.
Carlson said that as the coronavirus “pandemic” winds down, these leaders will find a “new emergency” that “justifies” making the powers they have granted themselves under the guise of COVID “permanent.”
“If you’re going to remain God, you’re going to need a devil to fight,” said the Fox News host, adding that the new playbook for the Western leaders will be to “find an enemy, create a crisis, stay in power forever.”
Carlson explained that Trudeau’s government is a prime example of this phenomenon through its cracking down on dissident journalists, its freezing of private bank accounts, its targeting of business that supported the Freedom Convoy, and its using of police to apply disproportionate and violent force on peaceful citizens who opposed the Trudeau regime.
Carlson warned that these actions are not intended by Trudeau to remain temporary or extraordinary measures, but rather, they indicate where the prime minister desires the country to head permanently.
“This is what the collapse of democracy looks like,” he said.
No sign of stopping
Even after Trudeau finally axed all of its COVID-related policies, Carlson still used his large platform to check in on his northerly neighbors, never missing a chance to mock the prime minister.
In June 2022, Carlson invited former National Hockey League standout Theo Fleury onto his show to expose the Trudeau government’s ties to the World Economic Forum.
Later that same summer, Carlson invited on Rebel Newsfounder Ezra Levant to discuss the Trudeau government’s online censorship efforts and its de facto journalism licensing scheme.
He also had on former Canadian Agricultural Minister Gerry Ritz to outline the dangers of the Trudeau government’s fertilizer reduction goals, and once dedicated an entire segment to mocking the prime minister’s $100 million pledge to LGBT groups in the nation.
On a more serious note, however, one of Carlson’s last Canada-related segments was on the life-and-death topic of euthanasia, particularly the Trudeau government’s efforts to expand euthanasia to minors and those suffering solely from mental illness.
Carlson commented that Canada’s medical system has become comparable with the Nazis’, saying that they were “famous for doing this exact thing.”
“[The Nazis] used doctors to murder the weakest in [their] society,” Carlson said. “I thought doctors kind of agreed after the Second World War not to do things like this!”
“A doctor’s job is to help people, make them better, not to kill them and give up on them when they’re kids!” he said.