Guns, Gardens, Quarantine, Euthanasia

There's something happening here
But what it is ain't exactly clear

~Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth” (1967)

For the most part, I do not subscribe to elaborate conspiracy theories. They are just too complicated with too many moving parts extending over too long a period of time to be either realistic or necessary to explain any given situation. Cover-ups, sure. There are plenty of those and always will be. But vast globalist conspiracies spanning years or lifetimes are a stretch for my logical, efficiency-loving Virgo mind.

However, four items came across my desk this week that gave me pause. The seemingly unrelated topics are:

1.     Guns

2.     Food

3.     Quarantine

4.     MAID

Each item, taken on its own, is troubling—worth keeping an eye on. But when they are all lighting up my twitter feed in the same week, it feels like something more.

As John Muir famously said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Let’s take a brief look at each. Tell me how your gut feels by the end.

Guns

On Friday, August 19, the Canadian federal government’s import ban on handguns took effect. This means that gun stores across Canada, whose shelves and warehouses have already been emptied of handguns in preceding months, can no longer restock. Permanently, or until there is a change of government.

Handgun sales in Canada sky-rocketed after May 30, when Justin Trudeau announced legislation (Bill C-21) that, once approved, will freeze future sales and transfers of handguns, thus permanently capping the number of legal, registered handguns in Canada to whatever number currently exists.

According to the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights, there have been more than 100,000 handguns sold since Trudeau’s Bill C-21 announcement less than three months ago. Two of those guns have my name on them and will be coming home with me once the papers are processed. I can attest to the mad frenzy and long waitlists for every type of handgun in every gun store in Canada because I was on most of those lists, which are now irrelevant, as there will be no new stock arriving.

Trudeau panicked when he discovered he had spurred Canada’s highest level ever of legal handgun ownership. He couldn’t wait for democracy to run its course with a vote in Parliament this fall. So Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino decided to use Canada’s “Cheese Law” (normally reserved for keeping American dairy products out of Canada) to now ban handgun imports—a move that didn’t require the inconvenience of parliamentary debate.

Of course we all loathe gun crime. But Trudeau’s attack on legal firearms and licensed firearms owners will do nothing to reduce gun crime in Canada, which primarily involves illegal and unregistered firearms smuggled in from the U.S. But it is worth noting that historically, whenever a government moves to disarm its citizens, things do not end well.

(Credit: Steve Nease, Nease Cartoons)

For an interesting read, see Bret Weinstein’s “The Liberal Case for Gun Ownership” in UnHerd last fall, albeit from a U.S. perspective.

Food

This could be a very long entry, covering the Dutch farmers protest over the fertilizer ban, and the looming Canadian farmers protest over same. These fertilizers bans are being pursued by the Canadian and Dutch governments ostensibly to meet Agenda 2030 nitrogen targets. But this clamp-down on nitrogen will unquestionably drive many farms out of business and reduce our food supply. And likely with no net benefit to climate, according to farmers I have spoken to.

So, as with the handgun freeze and also vaccine mandates, a segment of the population is being assaulted/vilified/scapegoated as a misdirect by government to conceal the lack of meaningful government action and solutions on climate, gun crime, and health care collapse, and to get us all fighting each other instead of challenging (or changing) government.

“The federal government is creating a boogey man ‘nitrogen’ and propagandizing it to help orchestrate an economic collapse,” says Wayne Osborne of Omega Blue Farms on Vancouver Island, a heritage animal and heirloom plant conservation farm selling food to many of us in the region. “One of the boogeymen often vilified when attacking modern agriculture… is manure,” Osborne told me. “Manure gets portrayed as toxic waste when it is really the foundation of green (organic) agriculture.”

And then there is the underreported story that made the rounds on twitter earlier this month that farms in Canada’s Northwest Territories can no longer sell their own produce directly to the community from a farm stand on their own property.

“The public is only allowed to buy food from producers who have government permission through a government 'permitting' program,” the Northern Farm Training Institute posted on Facebook on July 28. The post received considerable traction on twitter the following week but no coverage from legacy media that I could find. There was, however, a Youtube report on this.

The Northern Farm Training Institute is now giving away its produce and bread daily at their farm stand, since they are not allowed to sell it any longer. And they are gratefully accepting donations for the food.

And let’s not forget the mysterious spate of fires and other industrial disasters that have been destroying food processing facilities across North America since 2021—more than 100 such disasters by some counts, significantly impacting our food supply.

Stanley @UltraLandlord

Didn't see this one last week... Fire completely destroyed the Pendleton flour mill in Oregon. Green Craft, which owns the Pendleton flour mills, bills itself as the country’s largest independent flour milling enterprise, according to its website.

But these topics warrant an essay all their own. All I really had in mind right now with this “food” entry was this curious item that popped up in my twitter feed three days ago.

Conceivably there could be an innocent explanation for this government intrusion into a private garden. Something like, say… plum pox virus.

But is this to be our future now, our Brave New Normal? Every time the government wishes to invade our gardens or our bodies, some arcane pox will be trotted out as pretext? Because who can argue with the need to protect the citizenry (or plum trees) from pathogens?

Quarantine

Next, I direct your attention to this obscure but disturbing government funding announcement on Friday, August 19, for “a safe voluntary isolation site in the Windsor-Essex region.”

Because who wouldn’t rather pack themselves off to some strange quarantine facility than recover at home in their own bed and bathroom? That can’t possibly go wrong for civil liberties. How many more of these quarantine sites are we funding around the country? Who are they really for? And what is the government’s definition of voluntary? Is it similar to the “voluntary” status of the mandated injections?

M.A.I.D.

And finally, perhaps the most disturbing plot-point in this week of The Great Reset narrative—the story of a Canadian Forces veteran seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury, who was casually offered medical assistance in dying (MAID) by a Veterans Affairs Canada employee.

“The sources said the veteran was seeking services to recover from injuries suffered in the line of duty, and had been experiencing positive improvements in his mental and physical health,” Global News reports. “They say the unprompted offer of MAID disrupted his progress and has been harmful to the veteran’s progress and his family’s wellbeing.”

This is appalling. And I fear it will not be the last such story we read.

MAID first became law in Canada in 2016, but was only available to individuals whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” In other words, the terminally ill.

In March 2021, MAID was expanded to go beyond terminal illnesses and now also includes non-fatal mental and physical disabilities and conditions that government can’t be bothered to properly fund treatments and accommodations for.

In April of this year, a 51-year-old Ontario woman with severe Multiple Chemical Sensitivities used MAID to end her life after a desperate and futile two-year search to find affordable housing free of cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners.

So what are we really looking at here as the sum total of this snapshot of one week on twitter?

• Loss of self-protection sovereignty (not to mention recreational and competitive sporting choices) with the handgun freeze.

• Loss of food sovereignty through a variety of ominous developments.

• Loss of medical sovereignty with the announcement of a “voluntary” quarantine facility. Our medical sovereignty and bodily autonomy have been severely and repeatedly violated and disregarded up to this point in the Corona saga by our provincial and federal governments. The word “voluntary” has not been in the lexicon of Canada’s public health officials or political leaders. So the notion of any quarantine facility being or remaining “voluntary” does not inspire confidence.

• Loss of the right to live and thrive as government employees and medical personnel seem all too eager to solve difficult problems via euthanasia, thanks to the expansion of MAID and the underfunding of needed services and programs.

Are we seeing a pattern here?

So I ask you, does this confluence of isolated news items evoke the same uneasy feeling in your gut that it does in mine?

~

Kim Goldberg is a Vancouver Island writer and the author of eight books. Her latest is Devolution, poems and fables of ecopocalypse (Caitlin Press, 2020). Twitter: @AlsoGoldberg