Last Saturday, I met with a dozen other Kingstonians (including a City Councillor, a former mayoralty candidate and a former school trustee) for a brainstorming session on how best to go about organizing local public gatherings to collectively affirm Canada’s sovereignty in the face of President Trump’s attacks on our nation. Those of them who had recently been in touch with US friends and colleagues shared a disturbing observation. Their US counterparts were overwhelmingly against Trump’s threats to Canada as well as his undermining of US democracy but felt that they could not safely speak out for fear of suffering professional or other consequences.

Democracy is all about the freedom to publicly speak truth free from well-founded fear of reprisal. Historically, democracy dies when would-be dictators/autocrats are allowed to get away with weaponizing fear in order to obtain a stranglehold on power. By that token, the USA is already well down the path of ceasing to be the successful democracy that its founding fathers bequeathed to future generations. If we do not wish ourselves and our children to live lives of fear, it is critical that we as Canadians maintain our integrity by standing up to a threatened US takeover of our precious sovereignty in whatever guise.

We concluded our meeting yesterday with a decision to expand our group with sufficient additional volunteers to be in a position to organize an initial Kingston stand-up-for-Canada gathering within the next few weeks. If you might consider participating or are part of a similar group with which we could collaborate, please send us an email at standupforcanadakingston@gmail.com. Please indicate whether you would like to join our steering committee, potentially volunteer to help staff our events, or just be kept informed about future events. We will hopefully have a website relatively soon, but one step at a time. You can also help by widely sharing this post and encourage those people to do the same.