WARMINGTON: Communism alive and well at Oakville's city hall
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A texted tip said a couple of hundred communists had surrounded Oakville Town Hall.
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WARMINGTON: Communism alive and well at Oakville's city hall Back to video
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I had to do a double take. I figured it was exaggerated.
But since you just don’t hear something like that every day, I jumped into my gas-powered car and headed out to Trafalgar Rd. to see what the heck was going on.
Yes, there were communists there.
I found communism is alive and well in Canada, and particularly among some youth. It turns out there was actually a desk set up outside the front door of Oakville’s city hall with communist reading material and books on Marxism, complete with hammers and sickles.
But not everyone was receptive.
The high school students manning this desk ran into people much older than them who not only understand what communism is all about, but know what it’s like to actually survive the regimes that impose the ideology. There were some good, civil debates between these idealistic kids who should’ve been in school and adults who escaped from communist countries.
Alessa Polga, who left Venezuela for Canada 15 years ago, told them communism is no joke.
Trying to knock sense into these 18-year-olds, she told them of people who were “raped or put in jail” and had everything taken from them.
To their credit, these kids — who skipped school for the day to take this Marxist movement to city hall — were mostly respectful to the adults who generally did not fall for nonsensical arguments that communism is going to cure the world.
They say they want a fairer world. But the irony is such political activism would not be tolerated outside government buildings in North Korea, Cuba or China.
And the police would not be as lenient.
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You can cut them some slack because of their naivety and lack of worldly experience. You could even get a kick from their youthful exuberance as they fought for a cause they believe in.
That was until some of them started chanting “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” — and then you realize this protest was not just about communism but also about wiping away Israel from the river to the sea.
Not far away from this desk were students from Oakville high schools — many wearing Keffiyehs and carrying pro-Palestinian flags — chanting about a ceasefire and “Israeli genocide.” It seems these two causes are married to one another.
The only difference here is these anti-Semitic and anti-freedom protests happened during school hours.
In many ways, these are the troops for the progressive, socialist movement, which supports our current Liberal government and keep it in power.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is even hinting they will be the ones who benefit from new tax schemes that actually take money from baby boomers and redistribute it to millennials and Gen Z upstarts.
While most of the kids were respectful, a few seemed hostile and militant. But Halton Regional Police officers did a masterful job of defusing the situation so no one was hurt or arrested.
It was textbook policing. It was a grand thing to witness.
From an experienced sergeant to some new recruits, they did Halton proud. But even without a fight or arrests, the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that this was the youngest group of people selling communism that I had ever seen.
Where did they hear about communism? At school? Who’s funding their movement and supplying the printed material?
It’s also fascinating how Canada’s intelligence personnel were on top of the Freedom Convoy movement, but shrug off those pining for the overthrow of our embattled liberal democracy.
The kids were handing out red leaflets designed to attract recruits to this weekend’s “Revolutionary Communist Party’s founding congress” meeting in Montreal.
No word of bouncing castles or hot tubs mentioned — but all kidding aside — if the truckers were planning something like that, there would be noise about it.
So, in review, the tipster was correct. There were communists at Oakville’s centre of democracy.
And that was a picture of Vladimir Lenin on the table.
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