If the prime minister of a North African or Middle Eastern nation was forced into hiding by a protest occupying his capital city, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton would materialize from thin air to call for U.S.-backed regime change.

“Government Loses Popular Support,” newspaper headlines would blare, amid calls for sanctions, State Department-NGO initiatives and the inevitable “nation-building” exercises.

Justin Trudeau can rest easy, however. No such song and dance routine is in store for America’s northerly neighbor despite thousands of protesting truckers in Ottawa sending the prime minister underground. While imagining intervention in America’s northerly neighbor rightly seems risible, it does bring President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” to mind. We expect Canadians can handle their own affairs. Those Arab Spring nations of yesteryear obviously needed the Western man’s help, though.

But increasingly, it appears Canadian politicians are not actually demonstrating an ability to manage their own affairs, nor to bring logic or rationality to this scenario, brought about by some of the most restrictive COVID-19 policies in the world. Nor, until now, has it appeared they cared when anyone raised objections to those policies.

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