In late February, Trudeau invoked the previously unused Emergencies Act to quell weeks-long peaceful protests against vaccine mandates prompting widespread outrage and claims of government overreach.
“Canada has a fascist psychopath as prime minister and a [N]azi as deputy prime minister. They recently gave themselves extraordinary powers to crush peaceful dissidents,” Bernier said in a statement via Twitter.
Bernier also expressed his dissatisfaction with the much-maligned mainstream media coverage of the protests and his party, saying the PPC has been falsely painted as a “threat to Canadian democracy” despite the Trudeau government’s heavy-handed tactics.
Freeland, who also serves as Canada’s finance minister, drew the ire from Bernier and many others after being pictured at a demonstration holding up a scarf bearing the colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (an extremist organization banned in Russia) with a popular nationalistic phrase emblazoned on it.
The wave of protests across Canada began in mid-January, with tens of thousands of truckers and other Canadians converging peacefully on Ottawa demanding the government scrap the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The protest eventually united large swaths of Canadian society and evolved into a demonstration against the Trudeau government.
The Ottawa leg of the protests were routed by law enforcement at the end of February after the Trudeau government granted itself sweeping new powers through the declaration of national emergency.