Trudeau faced harsh critics in the EU Parliament this week. Here's who launched the attacks
CBC
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently addressed the European Union Parliament and warned of growing threats to democracy, he received an angry backlash from some elected members who accused him of responding to the recent anti-vaccine mandate convoy protest like a dictator.
The public rebukes by a handful of far-right, populist and anti-vaccine members of the European Parliament claiming Trudeau violated civil rights in response to the protest that occupied Ottawa for almost a month went viral on social media.
Trudeau's Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in history in February, giving police and other authorities extraordinary powers to disrupt the protest.
The verbal thrashing came after Trudeau addressed the assembly in Brussels, Belgium, where 705 elected members (MEPs) from the 27 EU member states constitute the largest elected assembly in Europe.
The European Union Parliament has a history of making news when outspoken members make controversial remarks. Some of those members represent parties that oppose the existence of the EU itself.
CBC News takes a look at what was said, who said it and how the European Parliament is vastly different from parliaments elsewhere in the democratic world.
Describing Trudeau as someone who "tramples" fundamental human rights and freedoms, Independent Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakušić said Canada once stood for civil rights but now seems more like a "dictatorship of the worst kind."
"Under your quasi-liberal boot in recent months," Kolakušić said, "we watched how you trample women with horses, how you block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can't even pay their children's education and medicine, that they can't pay utilities, mortgages for their homes."
Ontario's police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit, launched an investigation on Feb. 20 after a 49-year-old woman reported being seriously injured by a Toronto Police Service officer on a horse as police were clearing out people who had occupied Ottawa's downtown core.
"Mr. Trudeau, you are a disgrace for any democracy," said German MEP Christine Anderson, the political spokesperson for the ID parliamentary group in the European Parliament through her party Alternative for Germany.
Anderson went on to accuse Trudeau of civil rights violations during the trucker convoy protest, calling him a dictator who treats citizens as "terrorists."
Another Alternative for Germany MEP, Bernhard Zimniok, accused Trudeau of "trampling on democratic rights" by cracking down on people for protesting "disproportionate" public health measures.
Mislav Kolakušić, whose speech in the assembly went viral on his Twitter feed, is a failed Croatian presidential candidate and is not affiliated with any political party in the European Parliament. He has aligned himself with anti-vaccine voices inside and outside of the assembly.
Reuters reported earlier this year that Kolakušić had accused French President Emmanuel Macron of "murdering citizens" through vaccine mandates and that he claimed "tens of thousands of" Europeans had died from vaccine side-effects during the pandemic.
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