Something occurred in Canada a few months ago that got little traction, if any, here in the States (and, for that matter, in Canada itself due to routine censorship in the Canadian media), but which nonetheless needs to be spotlighted even now, as it is an example of leftist totalitarianism.
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The case involved a young man by the name of Nicholas Jordan Wagter. He attended Western University and Toronto University, majoring in medical biophysics and innovation management. In 2025, he published a paper in the journal Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience. While in Vancouver, he posted on his Instagram accounts about corruption in the Canadian government, and that the CCP was having a great influence in the Canadian government — among other things, establishing Chinese police stations in Canadian soil, particularly in Vancouver, thereby eroding Canadian national sovereignty. “The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Carney signed with China is explicitly a secret agreement to share intelligence and law enforcement resources regarding transnational crime (a key aspect of Canadian security and safety).” He also accused the Canadian government of becoming tyrannical by stripping citizens of their rights. Although the tone of his warnings was alarmist, if his allegations were true, then alarm was certainly merited.
At this point, let me digress in stating that many other Canadians have likewise warned of their government becoming authoritarian. This started with Prime Minister Trudeau, which violations have been verified by Amnesty International. And it is also true that Chinese police stations were established in Canada, America, and various European and Australian countries, to monitor and intimidate Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans, as well as to gathering intelligence. (Wagter appears to be of Chinese descent.)
On May 2026, Wagter held a meet-and-greet at a coffee shop. Instead, what occurred was an ambush. Several policemen wearing sidearms and tactical-style communication devices showed up with someone who said he was a nurse. The latter tried, very ineptly, to engage Wagter in conversation in order to make him say something detrimental to himself, but Wagter wanted nothing to do with the farce.
A psychiatrist by the name of Christine Taylor was sitting across the room, and it appears that she later certified Wagter as needing him to be put in a mental health facility. In the video that Wagter had on, and which the authorities asked be turned off (he refused), she does not speak with him other than eight words, or administer any psychological tests. I recently tried to contact her to verify that she had had, indeed, practically no interaction with him at the café, but I could not reach her, as she has since retired.
At no point in the subsequent controversy did anyone ever ask an important question of the authorities: Who called them? And why?
A few weeks later, Wagter was stopped while driving and was told he had been “certified,” so the police had to put him in a mental facility. Another psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Emery or Emory tagged along but said nothing. They asked him to stop recording the encounter, which he refused. They took him to Vancouver General Hospital, where two evaluators cleared him, but even so, was not released until later.
Incidentally, once a person certified, in Canada, they can force medications on him.
In both instances, Wagter is calm and coherent (unlike how I would be under similar circumstances, insulting them in three languages at the top of my lungs).
Upon release, he announced that his social media would henceforth not be posting political speech.
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During his sequestration, the mainstream media were predictably silent, but the internet was active with outrage.
This incident fits the pattern of leftist/communist authoritarians getting rid of dissidents, or at least discrediting them, by forcing a mental health evaluation and putting them in mental institutions. In America, Dinesh D’Souza was referred for a mental health evaluation by a judge during his trial on violating federal campaign election law. During the artificially produced COVID panic, William Spruance, a Georgetown law graduate, was suspended and ordered by the leftist school administrators to undergo psychological evaluation for questioning the absurd implemented COVID policies. Around the same time, Dr. Meryl Nass had her practice in Maine suspended and was ordered for psychiatric evaluation for having saved her patients’ lives with ivermectin (which leftists had referred to as “horse dewormer”).
You may remember Dr. Bandy Lee, who was afflicted with TDS and became obsessed with convincing politicians that President Donald Trump should be removed from office because she had arbitrarily judged him to be insane and “an existential threat to all humankind.”
But the most overwhelming torrent of accusation of being insane because of having political beliefs abhorrent to leftists occurred during the 1964 presidential elections. Barry Goldwater openly expressed being anti-communist at a time when saying so automatically resulted in hysterical shrieks of “McCarthyism.” He was called insane, a Nazi, accused of wanting to put opponents in concentration camps — the usual knee-jerk reactions, along with apocalyptic warnings, many of the accusations coming from leftist psychiatrists. This was such a scandal that after the election, the Goldwater Rule was put into practice within the field.
In communist countries, the practice has gone beyond referral for evaluation and beyond libel. In Cuba, in a gesture of defiance against the totalitarian regime, a Cuban waved the American flag, which resulted in his being sent to the mental hospital. He was released a year later and was allowed to emigrate to the United States.
Mao Zedong’s third wife was He Zizhen, a veteran of the Long March. When she found out he was having an affair with his translator and confronted him, she was packed up and sent to the Soviet Union, where she was helpfully put into a mental hospital.
During the Greek civil war, the Trotskyites were considered to be insane by the Stalinists. Nikos Zahariadis, in particular, was labeled insane (which may have actually been true).
All the communist countries at one time or another sporadically carried out the practice of labeling and institutionalizing persons whom the regime considered anathema, but it was the Soviet Union where the practice was more common, numbering into the thousands. (This was in the post-Stalinist era, when mass murder was frowned upon.) Psychiatrists who refused to prostitute themselves by falsely diagnosing individuals were themselves diagnosed insane by bureaucrats with a sick sense of humor. Some of the better known victims were Vladimir Bukovsky and Zhores Medvedev.
As we can see from the above, the practice of forcing a mental health evaluation on political undesirables and putting them in mental institutions is a recurring tactic of leftists. The difference in the intensity of this type of persecution varies widely, mostly depending on how much freedom has already been eliminated in the particular society. But one thing is for sure: With the present rise of leftist totalitarianism, we will see further cases.
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