BRUSSELS – “Trudeau’s ‘liberal’ Canada seems a dictatorship of the worst kind”. “Mr. Trudeau, you’re a disgrace to any democracy!”: with these words, European Mps Mislav Kolakusic and Christine Anderson attacked Justin Trudeau who was speaking, on Wednesday, in Brussels, to call for aid to Ukraine.
In his speech, Canadian premier accused “cynical populists” of offering “easy solutions that play on people’s fears, even in Canada where 90 per cent of people are vaccinated” and he brought up the protests over vaccine mandates that took over downtown Ottawa for three weeks earlier in the year.
In their follow ups, two members of parliament denounced the prime minister’s handling of the protests with angry diatribes.
In a speech that has gone viral, MEP Mislav Kolakusic of Croatia – lawyer and former judge, who sits in the European parliament as an Independent – has compared vaccine mandates to murder and said that “to defend our rights and the rights of our children, which we have acquired over the centuries, many of us, including myself, are willing to risk, our freedom and our own lives.”
However, he said Canada has gone from being a symbol of the modern world to a “symbol of civil rights violation” while under Trudeau’s “quasi-liberal boot.”
He continued: “We watched how you trample women with horses, how you block bank accounts of single parents so they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes,” said Kolakusic. “To you, these may be liberal methods, for many citizens of the world, it is a dictatorship of the worst kind.”
Kolakusic ended his speech with a warning that citizens of the world “can stop a regime that wants to destroy the freedom of citizens, either by bombs or harmful pharmaceutical products.”
PM Trudeau, in recent months, under your quasi-liberal boot, Canada ?? has become a symbol of civil rights violations. The methods we have witnessed may be liberal to you, but to many citizens around the?it seemed like a dictatorship of the worst kind. pic.twitter.com/FZuc6aDZ1I
— Mislav Kolakusic MEP ???? (@mislavkolakusic) March 23, 2022
The attacks against Trudeau continued when German MEP Christine Anderson, a member of the Alternative for Germany, a popular far right party that opposes the European Union as well as immigration to Germany, took the floor.
“A prime minister who openly admires the Chinese basic dictatorship, who tramples on fundamental rights by persecuting and criminalizing his own citizens as terrorists just because they dared to stand up to his perverted concept of democracy should not be allowed to speak in this house at all,” she said.
She ended her speech by telling Trudeau he was a “disgrace for any democracy” and “Please spare us your presence.”
????|Yesterday, Canada’s Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau visited the #EU Parliament to give a speech. I took the opportunity to give him an appropriate “welcome” there. Short, concise and right hitting the bull’s eye! #ID pic.twitter.com/qpcQyGTixQ
— Christine Anderson (@AndersonAfDMdEP) March 24, 2022
A video of both speeches have garnered over a million views each on Twitter as of Thursday afternoon.
Trudeau has been criticized for invoking emergency powers to disperse protests in Ottawa for a week starting in mid-February. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association challenged its use in court, saying the use of the act to remove COVID restrictions protestors was unjustified.