What if your next-door neighbor suddenly went dangerously insane and started holding people hostage in his house? Would you consider that threatening? Would you even notice? These aren’t theoretical questions. Something very much like that just happened in our neighborhood.

Canada — the land mass directly to our north and our single largest trading partner, with whom we share the longest international border in the world — took a dramatic move toward legitimately dangerous authoritarianism. Yes, Canada.

On Monday, the country’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, outlined his government’s new corona regulations. Canadians hoping to return to their country must be tested before and after takeoff, he said, adding: "If your test results come back positive, you’ll need to immediately quarantine in designated government facilities. This is not optional."

"Designated government facilities." When this happens in other countries, and it does, we call those internment camps. Because this is Canada we’re talking about, a place we assume is passive and polite and Anglo to the point of parody, no one thinks to use that term. In fact, no one seems to think about it at all.

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Trudeau’s internment policy has been in been place since last month, and as far as we can tell, no major U.S. news network has mentioned it. Neither has our State Department, which ordinarily seems to exist to make unhappy noises about human rights violations around the world. But not a word about Canada. Preconceptions may play a role in this. We assume that interning people is what Russia does. Boring people is what Canada does. But not anymore.

Suddenly, Canada is a flagrant violator of the most basic human rights. Fail a COVID test and they’ll lock you up without trial. Go ahead and try to disobey. According to the Canadian government, anyone who attempts to avoid detention in a government internment facility could face a million-dollar fine and three years in prison. 

This is Justin Trudeau’s Canada. It’s funny, Trudeau always seemed like a cheerful idiot, wearing weird costumes and yammering on about diversity. Who knew he was Mussolini? There might be a lesson here for other nations led by shallow, neoliberal empty suits. Underneath all the chirpy identity politics talk, it’s not a joke. It’s interment cells.

In Canada, where everything has a euphemism, those cells are referred to as "approved quarantine hotels." What are they like? Well, as noted, they’re internment cells. What do you think they’re like? There are shortages of food and water. You could be sexually assaulted. A member of the Canadian Parliament explained what they’re like.

CANADIAN MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT MICHELLE REMPEL: The Liberals instituted a federal hotel quarantine requirement for those entering Canada. We have heard reports that it is taking hours to get through to book these hotels, dietary restrictions are not being met, and food and water are not always readily available. That’s in addition to this program continuing after reports of sexual assault. This is mind-boggling.

Oh, the Liberals did this. It’s not very liberal to intern people, is it?

According to a report in The Post Millennial, doors in many of the internment facilities don’t lock. Detainees have no way to protect themselves while they sleep, hence the sexual assault. They also don't have access to medical care. In one case, Canadian authorities detained a man with diabetes called Ray Truesdale. What was his crime? Flying from Tennessee to Toronto on a business trip. As he waited in confinement for his coronavirus test results, his jailers forgot to feed him for more than twenty-four hours. Ultimately Truesdale left his cell and went downstairs in search of something to eat.

There, he found others who were being held without food. "They were screaming," he said. In the end, Canadian authorities informed Truesdale that his coronavirus sample had been damaged, so he had to remain in internment.

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Or consider Mitch Beaulieu, a Canadian who landed in Calgary after a business trip to Florida. He told CTV News that the experience very much like a kidnapping.

According to CTV, Beaulieu was "put in a black van with tinted windows and taken to an undisclosed location."

"Where am I going?" he asked. "Why am I going there?" The response came back: "We’ll tell you everything when you get there." He thought it was a prank. He thought it had to be. But it wasn’t.

"I get out there and there was plastic all over, people walking around in ... hazmat suits," he recalled. "It was like jail pretty much."

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Just don’t call it jail. That’s an order, directly from Canadian state media. This past fall, the CBC ran a story with this headline: "PM, health officials warn Canadians against believing COVID-19 'internment camps' disinformation."

Warn them against believing – sound familiar?

That claim, that conspiracy theory, said CBC, "that the federal government is preparing to forcibly intern Canadians is patently false." The CBC assured Canadians that the government was preparing "voluntary quarantine sites." Yes, voluntary in the sense of being mandatory, which is what they are.

By the way, as a matter of science, how does packing people into crowded internment facilities reduce the spread of the coronavirus? Some have asked the Canadian government that very question. But they haven’t explained.

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We do know, and this is significant, that Canada has fallen far behind other advanced nations in distributing the vaccine, which is interesting considering the decades of propaganda all of us here have been subject to about the glories of the Canadian healthcare system. According to Andrea Taylor, a researcher at Duke's Global Health Innovation Center, Canada "had more faith in the global supply chain than other countries."

Oh, they believed the whole globalism thing worked. That turned out to be a mistake. But rather than admit that globalist stupidity is the problem, Justin Trudeau decided to punish his own citizens. It’s his fault, and the population gets punished. Recognize that impulse? It should, because neoliberalism is always the same, no matter where you find it.

What’s so interesting is that Canada’s new rules apply only to COVID patients. Other transmissible diseases are exempt. People with AIDS aren’t being sent to internment facilities, thank God. No one’s tried that since Fidel Castro in the 1980s. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is fine too. That’s a real problem, but not in Canada. Only COVID, a disease with a 98% survival rate.

Weirdly, and you may recognize this as well, at the same they’ve clamped down on travel by citizens, the Canadian government has announced plans to admit 400,000 new permanent residents from other countries over the next eight months. Sound familiar? And by the way, that number will increase substantially in the next two years. None of these immigrants from the Third World will be forcibly quarantined in Canada. We’re not calling for them to be, but the difference is interesting. They won't be arrested, in fact, they’ll be rewarded, because they’re not citizens. Only the citizens are punished.

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Back in November, Justin Trudeau admitted what's going on. It’s not about stopping the coronavirus and saving lives. No. This pandemic, he said, is an opportunity to permanently change Western civilization:

TRUDEAU: This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actual address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.

We don’t want to give Justin Trudeau too much credit. He may be sinister, but he’s not smart. He didn't think that phrase up. He took it from his role models in this country. At a forum hosted by the World Economic Forum in mid-November, John Kerry -- our new climate czar -- laid it out.

"Yes, it [the Great Reset] will happen," Kerry said, "and I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine. In effect, the citizens of the United States have just done a Great Reset. We’ve done a Great Reset. And it was a record level of voting. We’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time."

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Has it been extremely exciting for you? Has it been extremely exciting for most Americans as the people in charge mismanage this country all the way to the brink? No, it probably hasn’t been. It’s been a sad time for most people.

For power-mad leaders hoping to eliminate centuries of constitutional restraints on their own ambitions, it is indeed an exciting time. Could what’s happening in Canada happen here? That’s the question. You might not think so. We don’t need internment cells. Unlike Canada, we have the vaccine, and we’re distributing it to tens of millions of people. Once you're vaccinated, you can live your life normally. That's the whole point of the vaccine. But then you wonder:

If that’s true, why are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris still wearing their obedience masks everywhere they go? They've been vaccinated. So has everyone around them. Why the masks? Why the restrictions? What’s going on here? We know for certain it’s not science. According to the CDC, once you're vaccinated, you don't need a mask anymore:

CDC DIRECTOR ROCHELLE WALENSKY, MONDAY: We can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.

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Well, we hope vaccinated people don’t carry the virus. Otherwise, why are we getting all these vaccines? Turns out the "real-world data" confirms common sense. Once you get the vaccine, you don't need a mask. That’s a Biden employee. So, why is everyone still wearing them? Why are people with vaccinations walking alone outside with masks on? Why are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wearing masks?

These are sincere questions. You’d think our media would ask that once in a while, but they’re not. They’re asking very different questions in the other direction. In fact, they’re heckling members of the opposition political party -- people who have been vaccinated -- and demanding they put their masks back on:

As if we needed to be reminded and we do, because we’ve lost sight of that  – that’s what the science says. But it doesn’t matter what the science says. Wear your obedience mask. Immediately. "It would make us feel better." Which is the passive-aggressive way of saying "do it, or else."

That interaction makes you wonder how our media would react if Dr. Fauci one day reluctantly concluded that actually, we need "coronavirus internment facilities" in this country. We don’t want to violate anyone’s rights, but we have to have them. How would our media respond?

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You realize the person who asked Ted Cruz to wear a mask badly wants him tossed into the back of a black van for coronavirus noncompliance? And not just Ted Cruz, but you, too. In fact, all the disobedient, politically inconvenient people should be held without trial (on public health grounds, of course) until they no longer pose a mortal threat to the rest of us. And by "the rest of us," of course, we mean the good people, the ones who obey.

Think that couldn’t happen here? Why, because the Constitution prohibits it? Think that couldn’t happen in America? It just happened in Canada.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 31, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight"