(Article by Peter Murphy republished from WattsUpWithThat.com)

And America is not far behind its northern neighbor in losing its freedom and becoming an effective dictatorship.

Climate change policies are the root cause of the transformation from a mostly free society to a less free, more tyrannical nation. The Canadian government, led by long-time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is climate fanatical and increasingly directing its citizens’ behavior in disturbing, ominous ways.

“There is no vaccine against a polluted planet,” said the prime minister back in late 2020 when he proposed raising the nation’s carbon tax. He also regularly refers to the “climate crisis” to explain his actions.

When the planet itself supposedly hangs in the balance, you can rationalize almost anything, no matter how silly, unscientific, or oppressive, starting with Mr. Trudeau’s false conflating of carbon with pollution, which is typical of the climate obsessives in America, too. The former is essential to life itself and inherent in Earth’s atmosphere, while the latter is a nuisance that has largely been solved as a practical matter in the U.S.

Carbon emissions from manmade sources are about 1/10,000^th of the Earth’s atmosphere, and their increase has had no palpable or corresponding effect on global temperature. Yet that scientific fact and historical reality get lost in the pursuit of governmental power and societal control well underway in Canada and the U.S.

As for pollution from particulate matter, it still remains but is nowhere near commonplace in the U.S. as it was in the 1970s when the recently formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was implementing the Clear Air and Clean Water Acts and other landmark laws enacted by Congress. With carbon labeled as “pollution,” the EPA found a new purpose and expanded its bureaucracy and power.

But, back to our northern neighbor.

Canada imposes a carbon tax, bans coal power plants, subsidizes electric vehicles, and heavily regulates methane gas emissions in the oil and gas industry. The Trudeau government has been embarking on a plan to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050, meaning carbon released into the atmosphere would be fully absorbed by planting trees, installing carbon capture storage facilities, and other measures, including blocking Canada’s provinces from extracting abundant energy from its tar sands.

One step Prime Minister Trudeau announced earlier this year at the “Democracy Summit” in South Korea was to pledge more than $8 million to commission a study on the supposed connection between “democratic decline” and climate change. Specifically, the money will be used to support climate change policy advocates in other countries, to reclaim “civic space to confront the climate emergency [and] support human rights defenders working on climate and industrial issues across the global south,” the prime minister’s statement read.

In reality, climate policies are steadily eroding “human rights” in Canada and the U.S. because they are increasingly restricting what kind of car you can drive, where you can live (or what can be built next to you), what you can soon eat and not eat, and how and where you can travel. Ideas that may seem outlandish now are the canaries in the coal mine, such as forcing high-rise, low-income apartments in suburban communities, banning fertilizer, or eliminating gas-power cars – all in the name of saving the planet from “climate pollution.

We should not doubt this worrisome, restrictive direction since wannabe dictators like Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden constantly give us not-subtle hints.

In early 2022, Canadian truckers organized a large, days-long protest in Ottawa that was ruthlessly broken up by Mr. Trudeau’s invoking the nation’s Emergencies Act to impose Marshall Law. This included blocking electronic donations to support the truckers and seizing protesters’ bank accounts. (CFACT supported the protests and raised funds for the truckers.)

Shortly following these protests, Mr. Trudeau was applauded by many in the European Parliament for warning against “threats to democracy”, yet his hypocrisy was too much some members, who condemned him for wielding his “quasi-liberal boot” against the protestors trying to protect their rights.

Now comes an effort by Trudeau to incarcerate his nation’s citizens who speak things he opposes with his Online Harms Act, which would effectively censor speech and includes empowering the police and courts to use Internet speech to impose fines and incarcerate those whom the state views as objectionable or threatening.

In the U.S., censorship directed by the Biden administration has been all too real, even though we are governed ostensibly by the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech.

“Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction,” said the 40^th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. “It must be fought for [and] protected.”

As the Trudeau government in Canada and the Biden administration here in the U.S. press on with climate policies that reach into every crevice of society, censor speech, and show a willingness to seize the bank accounts and incarcerate those who resist, freedom’s erosion in both countries is coming very rapidly indeed.

Read more at: WattsUpWithThat.com