That includes not posting flamewar comments, not calling names, not crossing into personal attack, not being snarky, and not using the thread for political or ideological battle. You can make your substantive points without any of that, and we want curious conversation here.
I've seen a lot of commentary about the fact that the Emergencies Act provisions "expire" automatically after 30 days, and include "safeguards", ergo there's nothing worry about. People getting hung up on the text of the bill forget that it's merely an Act of Parliament, and thus can easily be amended or replaced via a simple majority vote.
What played out last night indicates that none of these checks and balances really matter in a parliamentary system where the nuclear option of a non-confidence vote (and subsequent election) can be invoked to force any MPs with qualms to vote along party lines.
It's easy to see what will happen next, based on this government's track record: they will introduce amendments to the Act, or new legislation containing only the provisions they would like to make permanent, and once again proclaim that voting against the amendment will result in a new election.
They will probably also use it as an excuse to ram through their "Online Harms Bill", i.e. internet censorship, targeted at "misinformation" (disagreeable speech) and, many suspect, independent media outlets that the PM despises.
Internet censorship + government-directed financial de-platforming = Canada's near-term future if the situation doesn't change somehow.
What better check and balance to automatically topple of the government if you really disagree with invoking the act? It's a minority government even.
I suspect most people commenting haven't even read the act. It's actually very short and would take you less time than reading this article. One should entirely get hung up on the text of the act -- it outlines exactly what is possible and the consequences. It's actually very reasonable but point that out doesn't produce enough outrage up votes or get articles published.
I've read the Act. It's quite rich that it proclaims to still be tethered to the Charter, and yet the act allows government to compel people to do a job against their will, ban protest in specified areas, seize/confiscate assets without a court order... it's like when a bully yells "stop hitting yourself!" while pummelling you with your own arm.
I'm sure the rationale for why it's apparently Charter-compliant leans heavily on Section 1, but the courts have been far too generous in deferring to Parliament on use of Section 1 as a justification for "minor" infringements.
It has also never been invoked before, and hence has not withstood the scrutiny of a Charter challenge yet. It may not, in fact, be Charter-compliant.
It's interesting to observe the different failure modes of western nations in the last decade. Democracy is undermined by populism, parliamentary systems are unstable with regards to civil rights, the Fourth Estate of media is completely compromised by local corruption, massive conglomerates, rich activists, and weird tribal mobs that flit from panic to panic, all of them degrading anything and everything in pursuit of wealth or political advantage.
Nothing is sacred or revered, to the extent that religion is being replaced by diy mysticism, ideology, politics, or Great Causes, be it climate or BLM or MAGA.
In my mind, the solution is cultural. We need shared values and deep understanding of the principles that govern our countries. We need good faith debate and review of outdated laws, revision or excision of bad ideas - racial language, weird moral errata, and finally a sufficiently detailed and rigorous regulation of novel technology that older concepts fail to account for.
Social media, adtech, and search engines aren't common carriers, but legislation shouldn't try to shoehorn regulation of platforms and communities into pre-internet legal paradigms. It's way past time for regulation and legislation of digital liberties.
The 2nd amendment in the US didn't account for nuclear weapons. The war on drugs and the current global legal system around drugs didn't account for human nature and civil liberty. Section 230 and phone companies and cable TV aren't concepts that map properly to the modern internet, and we'll probably see radical changes at an increasing rate. Nailing down basic things like digital privacy rights, penalizing surveillance, rewarding innovation and fixing patents and copyright are crucial, but apparently it doesn't test well, so nobody is fundraising for that platform.
Canada is not bad, but things can break down rapidly. Trudeau will fail on the side of authoritarian control, so any actual damage resulting from that should be fodder for debate on refining the system and protection from abuse. And if no damage is done, recognizing and reinforcing the fail-safe structures in government is probably necessary.
> The 2nd amendment in the US didn't account for nuclear weapons
What a wild straw man argument. On the one hand, I generally agree with you. On the other hand, I am fairly confident I wouldn't trust anyone to decide for me what limits there are on "revision or excision of bad ideas".
So much of what you argue for relies on trust- trust that we are all working towards a common goal, primarily. However, there really doesn't seem to be a clear path forward when both sides assume the other side is arguing in bad faith.
Somehow everyone making those arguments is also happy to overlook the reality of operating such weapons in any purposeful way.
I'm not aware of any military that deploys a precision marksman without a spotter. That makes a precision rifle a two-soldier job. .50 caliber machine gun? two, maybe three boots? Squads will have members with DMRs or LMGs but they aren't suitable for the same task -- they just extend the capabilities of the squad.
Extend that to thinks like fighter jets, nukes, comms, etc. etc. and the actual threat of any of those is drastically reduced outside the crazy people do crazy things category of events, and even then, you're going to need a big group of crazy people.
The replacement and actual threat already exists and was popularized in the Middle East in the 70s and arrived here in the 90s but it isn't sensational but I'm not confident I wouldn't end up on yet-another-watch-list by saying it explicitly. So, yay, freedom.
> We need shared values and deep understanding of the principles that govern our countries.
This is the mainstream prescription since there has been bellyaching about the woes of the age (i.e. forever, or provably, since the invention of writing).
One idea that I think is more interesting is Machievelli's - he pointed out that the Roman state was at its most dynamic and powerful when it was locked in permanent internal contradiction: between the landless and landed.
One can easily carry the analogy along. The 60's, in its time, was seen as a moment of social disintegration and civilizational collapse. In retrospect however, we can see that an america that had not had the 60's would be a scary, oppressive place, a perpetual 1955 of the human soul.
Only one was an embarrassed Southerner. The rest were nonplussed or outright angry that the article and confessions were published. There are black people alive today who were alive then, it hasn’t been that long.
Every time someone says anything good about any year prior to 1980 or so someone shoots back with this low effort quip. I think it's obvious that anyone praising the 1950s in 2022 can be assumed to be saying "like that but for everybody" unless there is a specific reason to think they want to exclude certain groups.
I don't understand your comment. The whole reason why most nightmarish historical moments are considered nightmarish is because they give certain groups drastically elevated rights, and others none. Talking about an apartheid society without talking about privilege is nonsensical.
>The whole reason why most nightmarish historical moments are considered nightmarish is because they give certain groups drastically elevated rights, and others none. Talking about an apartheid society without talking about privilege is nonsensical.
The 1950s were not nightmarish for anybody actually living in them. Racial minorities, though still mistreated, were mistreated a heck of a lot less than in decades prior and had much more economic opportunity though they were starting from lower on the ladder on average than white people.
That economic opportunity is what everyone wants back.
The fact that you can consider the 1950s in the US a "nightmarish historical moment" is nonsensical, to put it very, very charitably.
> The fact that you can consider the 1950s in the US a "nightmarish historical moment" is nonsensical
Well, you can go upthread and read about the lynching of Emmet Till, or familiarize yourself with any of the many ways in which the Jim Crow laws were formally and informally enforced. You can look at the photograph of Emmet Till, even, before or after he was lynched.
Maybe you have thicker skin than I, but I think living in a community where you could be brutally killed for any or no reason, and knowing that your killers would not be convicted, is a nightmare.
>ell, you can go upthread and read about the lynching of Emmet Till,
Funny you mention that. I was this >< close to preempting your comment by mentioning him but figured I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.
Ask yourself, why do you even know Till's name? Why did Till's killing spark national outrage when 20yr later that would have gotten barely a peep out of people? Because times changed and that kind of behavior was no longer excusable.
>but I think living in a community where you could be brutally killed for any or no reason...
Till was killed for violating social norms (that he presumably was not sufficiently aware of). His death was no different than that of a peasant 1000yr earlier killed for bad mouthing a local lord. It's tragic. But it wasn't without reason, though we may think the reason flimsy and disagreeable.
And this time I am going to head off the inevitable reply by pointing out that I am not defending or justifying Till's killers, just explaining the context.
> Till was killed for violating social norms (that he presumably was not sufficiently aware of).
You are defending them; your 'context' is simply how these particular murderers justified their actions. The real context is that white people could kill black people with impunity. The context is not that black people kept on making mistakes.
That is a large chunk of history and a lot of people were in it. You've put forward 1 name. Although there is an argument for your position, you haven't made it. Can things even have been said to have changed if there was 1 example in the 50s and 0 examples in 2020? That is a low-signal trendline.
People still felt the need to propose an anti-lynching law in 2020 [0] so maybe lynchings are an ongoing problem. There isn't anything to argue about without actual evidence.
The point about a lynching is it is a message. Imagine the power dynamic between a black man and a white man in the south, when the black man knows that the white man can murder him and get away with it.
This particular lynching was obviously not the only proof of this reality in the decade.
> That economic opportunity is what everyone wants back.
Given the frequency of folks literally marching around with Confederate and Nazi flags, you've overstated your case here. Perhaps that's what you want, but there's a significant movement in support of a white ethnostate. That movement has representation in the Republican party, and for example Tucker Carlson is wont to voice its talking points and his show is one of the most watched on cable TV.
Pretending that racism was just a blip in the past and not a present and ongoing problem, or ignoring it because it didn't impact your parents, is at best naive. The Emmet Till case was a stark reminder to Black Americans that their lives were worthless in the eyes of the law and the white citizens who had the power to change it. To call that event terrorizing is not remotely a stretch.
What will people in 2092 think of 2022? I won't be around to see it unless Bezos makes a breakthrough in immortality research but I really doubt this decade will be seen as the magical time when we finally figured everything out. Our grandchildren will probably not look on our time any more fondly than we look on the '50s.
I doubt people in the '50s thought "we are evil and we enjoy being evil so we shall be evil". If you read contemporary magazines and newspapers they actually thought they were quite modern and progressive. And why not? 1955 was as modern in 1955 as 2022 is today. It's only in retrospect that it looks backward and barbaric.
Many things that were seen as modern and progressive then are looked on in horror now (lobotomy, gay conversion therapy, insulin coma therapy, using asbestos in cigarette filters, segregation, redlining, anti-miscegenation laws, blacklisting communists, anti-sodomy laws, many others).
What will the list of "Oh my god can you even BELIEVE people did that?" look like in a couple of generations? I've got some ideas but they're almost certainly wrong because I can't see the future any more clearly than the 1950s people could. I would however bet my life savings that some of the values held by all right thinking decent people now will be seen as abhorrent in 70 years. I just can't tell you which ones. Conversely some things seen as shocking now, stuff that will get you ostracized from polite society, will be believed by all right thinking decent people in 2092. Again I can't tell you which ones (nor do I think it will even be related to race, disability, or LGBTQ+). But this does seem to be the pattern.
To be clear I am not saying consensus views were more right then, or that we are wrong now, or that I wish X, Y, or Z thing would make a comeback. I'm just saying I don't think we've finished history yet and we should wait till history is over before patting ourselves on the back.
Wrong. A democracy, at least a functioning and legitimate one, is not judged by enacting the will of the majority, but by protecting the rights of the minority.
That democracy was dead before it started. A democracy cannot survive without broad agreement in the value of the individual. That is a failure mode of democracy that can be brought about via poor civics education. This is why universal public education is so critical to a functioning democracy.
It's a preparatory phrase, and does not limit the rights to an organization. Remember, the 1st 10 Amendments were just meant to reiterate inherent rights in the individual, and ensure that they were not encroached upon by a tyrannical government.
You are saying that politics would be easier if everyone shared your values. OK. Whose calues should we pick? How to decide? What do we do with people who disagree?
I don't care what your values are, just that we should find some sort of common ground if we want to maintain and improve the country, or world, we find ourselves sharing.
The principles don't have to be mine, and they don't need to be political, even. It's even possible with something silly... "America has the best fucking apples on the planet, and we're goddamn proud of that. Everything we strive and suffer for is for the best goddamn apple pie in human history, and if you wanna take that, you can pry it from our cold dead hands. "
Right now, we're socially fractured in every way possible to fracture under the threshold of combat, and even that is failing in some places.
We better figure out what it means to be American before there's no point to it, or before it fails so badly that continuing as an American means fatally corrupting any principles or ideals we claim to hold.
There are ideas for seasteads and crypto-nations that I find compelling, but I'm not a utopian. I think the Constitution is something admirable and the ideals are structurally important for any notion of liberty going forward in history. I hope that America finds its way back to some sort of cohesion but I don't see any paths toward anything resembling unity.
> Canada is not bad, but things can break down rapidly. Trudeau will fail on the side of authoritarian control,
That feels accurate. The next question then becomes, how will that play and/or be exploited in the USA, it's neighbor.
Let's, for a moment, presume there are entities within the USA that would welcome the opportunity. Now back to Canada...how much outside (i.e., USA based) influence is being exerted on the situation in Canada to tilt things towards the authoritarian?
This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a simple extrapolation of history. Let's not be naive.
If anything, it seems like the trucking protest was a case of American dollars and influence trying to tilt Canada towards right-wing populism. Granted, that appears to have been a grassroots fundraising campaign and not American government policy or CIA black budget money (as underwrote, e.g. the failed anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro coups Venezuela). The banking measures look like a ham-fisted, authoritarian attempt to squelch that.
I think this feels "new" to Americans because it's on our border, and because Canada looks more like the US and is assumed to be more stable and less prone to authoritarian emergency measures than e.g. Venezuela or Argentina. But similarly extreme and extra-judicial banking controls have been implemented by other governments in the hemisphere when authoritarian left-wing parties in power feel threatened by right-wing populist movements they believe are at least partly sponsored by America.
> If anything, it seems like the trucking protest was a case of American dollars and influence trying to tilt Canada towards right-wing populism
Why? Canada already has a strong conservative movement, and NAFTA makes it damn easy for US-based companies to do as they please.
This reeks of the same forces that got Trump elected. Which would be a mix of billionaires, Russian money, and anyone who has an axe to grind against Canada, e.g. China (for the Huawei, et al, conflicts).
You might have misread me. Nothing I said was contrary to this. There certainly may be billionaires, Russian money, etc. in the mix; those indeed helped to fund American right-wing groups, whose members in turn contributed to the Canadian truckers. I'm just making the point that even though it's not American policy this time, US secret services and US corporations have a long history of funding right-wing groups all over the Americas; and that this isn't the first time it's provoked left-leaning governments to respond with overt financial controls and seizures.
There was likely influence coming from Left and Right. If one gets involved, the other isn't going to sit on the sidelines. This comes as direct involvement, as well as the media spin that covers such an event.
It's difficult to understand where the legit events ends and the outside influence begins. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's simply how these things work, with so many chef's in the kitchen (and that in general, the media can't be trusted).
> I suspect most people commenting haven't even read the act.
You could have provided a helpful link to said act. I would like to read it.
Although I do want to comment on the 30 days thing - this protest isn't that special. If a majority of politicians think it is appropriate to freeze people out of the banking system now, why will they have changed their mind in 30 days? This is going to be a routine response.
The specifics aren't exactly new (governments have been able to go after bank accounts for a long time) but the idea that it can be done on a mass scale is one of the most powerful arguments for crypto that I've ever seen. There is now a risk of being debanked for having the wrong sort of political opinions! These tactics are a horrific assault on the principles of liberty.
It isn't really the crux of the argument, but there are already concerning stories of it being abused [0]. Given the trend of dehumanising political opponents, it is easy how stories like this become less of a 1-off and people would still be making positive murmurings.
Indeed, everybody has been going along with sanctions of nations and organizations with the wrong political opinions, up to and including frozen bank accounts or even prison for so much as financially supporting those nations and organizations. But that was terrorism, so anything goes, right? Up here in Canada, the Conservatives proposed, and the Liberals enacted, a law (Bill C-51) to classify interference with "critical infrastructure" as an act of terrorism. But that was targeted at those pesky pipeline protesters, so anything goes, right?
So now the shoe is firmly on the other foot, and I can't help but wonder if folks will finally realize that disruptive protests are a necessary component of democracy, or if we're just going to keep going in circles because the entrenched politicians stay in power when their voter bases are at eachothers' throats.
It's so much more exciting to believe the government is freezing the accounts of political opponents than the boring facts about how crowd funding hasn't been subject to normal anti-fraud and anti-terrorism regulations.
I consider the worst part to be that many Canadians (particularly the educated) seem to be fine this is happening, or even openly advocating for it. This more than anything else makes me very concerned about how Canada navigates the next little while.
Canada is not America. We trade some freedoms for a healthier, more robust system. I find the American reactions to our system confusing, honestly. Our democracy is not in danger, nor are the majority of Canadians concerned about this.
The greatest concerns seem to be from Americans and this is particularly bad on Reddit, where the Canadian subreddit has been captured by right-leaning Americans mainly.
Let's be clear that the CCLA is not an organization that many Canadians have even heard of (unlike the ACLU), and that their stance really doesn't carry any weight more than any other organization weighing in on this.
The act was passed specifically to curtail charter abuses from the previous bill and in the end, still answers to the charter.
I'm Canadian and I'm both familiar with CCLA and glad they exist, especially at the moment. Not to be hyperbolic, but many people around the world don't know Amnesty International exists until they find themselves locked up without due process and find that they have a weighty advocate.
>Our democracy is not in danger, nor are the majority of Canadians concerned about this.
"Fully 61 percent of Americans said they approve of renewing the Patriot Act's provisions to allow for continued collection of phone data, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Monday, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."
>The greatest concerns seem to be from Americans and this is particularly bad on Reddit, where the Canadian subreddit has been captured by right-leaning Americans mainly.
On the contrary, I feel like the pandemic has revealed the fragility and asymmetric distribution of costs in our society, and the governments unwillingness to even address it. I do not consider democracy in danger, but there are some pretty serious precedents being set.
I suspect Canadians aren't concerned because for the most part Canadians have lived a very comfortable existence for a very long time due to the nature of our geopolitical privileges. I think the hyperbole tossed around regarding the convoy and blockade illustrate this.
It’s not America but it was founded with western liberal ideas to be a functioning self-governing democracy and have English common law ideals similar to America. Chief among those is due process which this emergencies act completely sidesteps.
It's a system set up with "here's where the American system gets screwy" hindsight available, though. The two systems are cousins, not identical twins.
Absolutely agree. The American viewpoint seems to be "restrictions on freedom of speech! Not allowing protests! Canada is becoming a dictatorship!" which I think is an absurdly extreme reaction, particularly in a minority parliament.
I think Canadians have more faith in our institutions, particularly the courts, to remain apolitical.
> I think Canadians have more faith in our institutions, particularly the courts, to remain apolitical.
Speak for yourself. Also consider that an estimated 9% of all Canadians live abroad (mostly in the US and Europe), including up to 25% of professionals in certain industries (doctors, for example, and I'm sure tech is up there too).
Lots of Canadians don't have faith in our institutions. Unfortunately, moving away is easier than changing the docile Canadian mentality and is a better individual choice.
Edit - and for comparison purposes around 1.7% of Americans live abroad.
> Speak for yourself. Also consider that an estimated 9% of all Canadians live abroad
I was speaking for myself, as I see it, as are you. Note that I was one of the 9% living abroad for ~3 years.
> the docile Canadian mentality
I rather disagree with this supposed generalization
> moving away is [..] a better individual choice
Yes, for those who are more professionally desirable (doctors, tech, other professionals as you mention), moving to the US in particular is the "better individual choice", in that you can earn a better living. I certainly could, but I prefer to live here with my fellow docile Canadians.
Most Canadians I imagine live abroad for economic reasons. But that in itself is a failure of our institutions; an economy is a reflection of the set of rules created by the government.
Anyhow, some examples:
- Police, it's obvious they can't do their jobs. Between inability to clear protests, all our cities being taken over by crackheads, it's failed.
- Courts: basically catch and release. Murder regularly gets plead down to manslaughter with pathetic sentences
- Municipalities: make starting a physical business damn near impossible. Tons of red tape and random fees, then you get taxed to hell because homeowners can't possibly pay for their share...
- Healthcare: it's a joke. Worst of any country in our income bracket yet Canadians inexplicably think it's not shit.
- Bank of Canada: literally went out and said they're propping up house prices
- Feds: literally said they are bringing in immigrants to reduce wage inflation ie. Prevent wage growth. Trudeau senior capped wage increases for awhile while in power...
Tons more examples of failed institutions in this country...
I want to live near extended family for a while and have another life experience. Living abroad doesn't mean it's better than Canada but that I want to experience something different for a while.
I'll be back ... None of the issues you listed stand out at all to someone born in Canada but who has lived in 5 countries (mix of very rich, middle income and poor). Ok, I admit the housing price situation bothers me.
To judge by IP addresses, at least, there are a lot of Canadians posting to HN on both sides of this argument. There are also a lot of users from other countries posting on both sides of the argument. The dividing line seems more ideological than national.
Thanks for the insight, Dan. I think that HN does over-represent (relative to population at large) the libertarian viewpoint, but my comments really stemmed from what I've seen of mainstream media coverage of the issue from the two sides of the border.
>And the emergencies act is being challenged in court, which will determine if this is lawful.
The difference is that in liberal democracies, the executive branches has to convince a court before they can act. eg. getting a warrant before doing a search, or getting a conviction before imprisoning someone. The approach of "shoot first, you can sue us in court later" makes a mockery of this.
>Banks are private entities. They freeze accounts engaged in illegal activities regularly. The US does too - here's one random citation. [1]
They're both bad. This is just slightly worse because the government is directing businesses into targeting their political enemies.
In this case the executive didn't do any convincing, the legislature did. It's a parliamentary system - the executive is an extension of the legislature.
> The difference is that in liberal democracies, the executive branches has to convince a court before they can act. eg. getting a warrant before doing a search, or getting a conviction before imprisoning someone. The approach of "shoot first, you can sue us in court later" makes a mockery of this.
Uh no, not really. I'm going to presume you're comparing with the US. Do you forget that the US kidnapped, imprisoned and murdered random people, including American citizens without any judicial oversight? Not to mention sweeping surveillance with laughable pretense of judicial oversight ( FISA courts)?
Executive branches have lots of power, and that power is controlled via checks and balances, the judicial and legislative branches ( in many countries the executive branch' power comes from the legislative and is directly beholden to it ( where PMs are sitting MPs)).
>Uh no, not really. I'm going to presume you're comparing with the US. Do you forget that the US kidnapped, imprisoned and murdered random people, including American citizens without any judicial oversight? Not to mention sweeping surveillance with laughable pretense of judicial oversight ( FISA courts)?
And? That's just as bad. I'm saying canada's actions are bad because they go against how liberal democracies should work, not against how the US works in practice
>Executive branches have lots of power
That's exactly why I'm concerned.
>and that power is controlled via checks and balances, the judicial and legislative branches ( in many countries the executive branch' power comes from the legislative and is directly beholden to it ( where PMs are sitting MPs)).
And 9/11 in the US shows how easily the populace can be convinced to abandon those liberal democracy ideals given a threat.
The key here is that these people are not engaged in illegal activities or even accused of engaging in illegal activities before their accounts are frozen and before they have been given any chance to defend themselves. Rapists and murderers don’t even get treated this badly. They are treating them like terrorists.
> The key here is that these people are not engaged in illegal activities or even accused of engaging in illegal activities before their accounts are frozen
What stood out the most about these protests, vs most other large protests in recent Canadian history, is how many warnings the participants received. They were told time and time and time again by every party involved that their conduct was illegal - from the police as well as from municipal, provincial, and federal level. They were even given a court injunction against certain specific actions (horn honking), which was largely ignored after the first 24 hrs. They were engaged in illegal activities for weeks before this action was taken.
> That has nothing to do with freezing accounts of donors, or blocking donations.
Yes, it does. The donations were specifically to fund an activity that had been deemed illegal. Similar to the other things tracked by FINTRAC.
I have seen only one claim of a donor being targeted, and quite frankly, I didn't trust the source, but it is possible. The RCMP issued a statement [1] yesterday clarifying that the only information they had provided to banks was regarding organizers and trucks blocking the street (both groups were made explicitly aware that their behaviour was illegal and would have consequences).
But they are engaged in illegal activities, which you can find with a cursory Google search. And blocking borders and pipelines can arguably be classified as economic terrorism.
They are fully welcome to protest peacefully, on foot, in front of parliament like everyone else.
Yes, donating money can be illegal depending on what it is being donated to. Here[1]'s a list of financial transactions that would be tracked in Canada.
Banks freeze accounts under the effective duress and cover of the government, because freezing money is stealing money from someone, even if you (might) give it back one day. If they didn't have the cover of the government then they would be under a ton of liability.
Much like how taking someone's car, even if you plan to give it back one day, maybe, if you think they deserve it, is still theft.
Because banks do it under duress, it's really the government that is doing this, not the bank itself.
Yeah, Kenney's lawsuit is mostly political grandstanding, but I welcome the use of the Act being challenged in court. All this makes our democracy stronger.
A law was on the books for decades but hadn't been used. It has now been used (in a rather restrained way, considering what it could be used for). This use is now being challenged in court, which will likely clarify what restrictions the use of that law actually has. Eg, did it respect the charter appropriately? Was it appropriately justified?
Why does that make democracy stronger? It's just an elaboration of a particular interpretation of the rules by jurists that are probably already not uncomfortable with the state.
The outcome of those deliberations will be to some extent obscure and subject to yet further interpretation and arguments.
That doesn't in, and of itself, make democracy stronger.
I would argue that the use of this Act has already weakened democracy in Canada because it shows that the only response the political systems has to a very minor disruption is to use acts that everyone understood to be for much more extreme situations.
This has already deepened many people's cynicism about the idea of this form of government.
> I would argue that the use of this Act has already weakened democracy in Canada because it shows that the only response the political systems has to a very minor disruption is to use acts that everyone understood to be for much more extreme situations.
Certainly the act was used in response to weaknesses in the system - eg the Ottawa Police Service were unwilling to fine/ticket/otherwise deal with the illegal activity for weeks; crowdfunding sites weren't subject to FINTRAC; etc. Ideally this will lead to proper legislation regarding these weaknesses, removing the necessity of using the Emergencies Act to deal with a similar situation again.
Legal certainty? It was supposed to be the answer to the problems for the War Measures Act; the Constitution of Transitional Measures Act; the Emergency Powers Act; the Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act and some others I have forgotten.
I would argue that laws only mean what they are interpreted to mean by a particular governmental body at a particular time.
And you can in addition have a coherent, clear and easily interpretable body of laws and measures which result in a society which lacks many of the features of what people like to imagine is a "democracy".
Fair enough. It's better than nothing, but probably not good enough. We'll be seeing more of this sort of problem as living standards decline under climate destruction and the buffers separating us from more direct conflict of interest thin out.
In fairness, the leaders of this protest are on video literally discussing topics that would be considered racist (ie: depopulation of the white race).
If I had access to my laptop I'd locate the video (self-filmed) where Pat King discusses this exact topic. Someone may be able to find this for us.
Why would that matter? Should I take away your rights if I disagree with your views?
Ultimately the true test for the existence of guaranteed rights is if those who you and the majority of people absolutely hate and despise have their rights guaranteed and protected in the same way and with the same vehemence as those of the average Joe.
A right lives and dies by our willingness to protect it for those who we hate.
I'm canadian. That's not true for me, nor many people I know. Canadians have "liberal elites" just like the US, and they tend to over represent on HN, but there is not some Canadian phenomenon about trust in institutions. We have apathy and only get politically involved when we absolutely have to, if I have to stereotype. But it's certainly not because we trust "institutions" especially. I've heard this only recently as a general talking point abou Democrats/liberals, but it seems like something that just got made up to justify current support of orthodoxy. It certainly wouldn't have been true on the George W Bush days for example.
The 'freedoms' (more accurately called rights) that Canada sacrifices to make the country work better and simpler, such as specific local & state rights, are not the lost freedoms that most Canadians think make the country better. By removing some forms of vetocracy, the state can coordinate better and avoids some forms of small scale corruption, although not enough as most of the housing crisis shows.
Much of the dysfunction of the USA partly comes from it's size and it's economic, climatic & historical diversity compared to Canada. Canada is significantly smaller economically, historically and population wise. It is also a country that has had consistently cold winters, which creates cultural values that forces you to save for the winter, which makes everyone work better together, which is something you see similar with Scandinavian countries [0].
The USA has many climates that make fairly different cultures in subtle ways. Canada works better because it's smaller and accidents of history, not because they don't have free speech. Canada is more american than they feel comfortable with, and this creates a unease that makes them feel like they need to differentiate themselves on minor difference, much like two twins.
[0] If your wondering why russia doesn't work like scandinavia, one reason why is hundreds of years of brutal mongolian rule, while scandinanvia avoided that trauma.
Interesting theories. First, i find that the communal work togetherness is also present in Mediterranean European countries which don't have that bad winters. Second, i don't get the premise behind the Mongols explanation. Doesn't a common external enemy make people work together even more? Furthermore many countries were rules by Mongols ( including China and most of Central Asia), yet they exhibit varying levels of "togetherness"/communal spirit.
I completely disagree with everything you said. And please do not pretend to speak on behalf of "most Canadians".
"Most Canadians" likely could not care less about things that does not affect them directly. And the opinions of the ones who do are most likely split in very different proportions contrary to your claim.
But yes, tiresome to see people trying to claim that they know the mind of the people.
We`ll see next elections: I bet Conservatives will do well and the Liberals will decline and the NDP will be wiped out. Jagmeet Singh has managed to extract the worst possible position from this.
It's very difficult to know which way things will turn. The most likely leader of the CPC supported the protests directly, and I think we will see that hurt them somewhat. The interim leader is a definite liability.
Trudeau is not making friends, but given a lack of strong leadership from any other party, you may not see them able to pull any more support out. The only poll that matters is the election and it's probably fair to say we don't know what will happen.
The protests may be a distant memory by then. And if one of the parties gets a handle on housing prices, that could swing things.
Jean Charest is not exactly loved in quebec. The end of his provincial premiership was pretty rough and his name is a bit synonymous with "corrupt slimey politician". But I'd bet Québec would still vote for him just because he's from "our team" and he's a very familiar figure
Calling the Canadian system robust is just detached from reality. Between the fact that quebec has not even signed the constitution yet, the opportunist and sometimes never ending elections, the total mess that is our constitution and charter... and your comment is in a thread where the government invoked an act that strips away almost all our charter rights and does away with due process. Do you not see the irony? That has never happened even in the USA.
I guess it's just natural for canadians to have this weird smug inferiority complex towards the US but you have to remember that our government admitted to committing a genocide (still ongoing) barely 2 years ago. Also on average even a majority government rarely gets more than 34% of the total votes. But I'm legimately curious as to what parts of our system you see as being so healthy?
Btw saying that the majority of canadians are not concerned at all about setting the precedent of suspending charter rights over a protest is just a complete self own if it was true and I don't think it is. Well at least I hope it isn't
> I guess it's just natural for canadians to have this weird smug inferiority complex towards the US
There was an article in the Montreal Gazette this January that was very earnest, but if you read it with a critical outside perspective, it's absolutely ludicrous:
So this guy fled Quebec's corona restrictions for a vacation in Florida, and describes this experience while constantly complaining how Floridians are ignoring corona, and putting in a bunch of digs at the US healthcare system.
But at the same time, why did he go to Florida if everything is so terrible there? And if Canada's healthcare is so great, why was his pre-departure corona test that he needed to take before being let back in to Canada, free and easy to get in Florida? And why was the post-arrival test he needed to do in Quebec, expensive and hard to get?
The amount of Stockholm syndrome and "Canadian apologetics" is completely off-the-charts. I simply cannot understand how you can write an article like this in the first place, it's absolutely deranged.
(The height of irony, of course, is that at the time of the article's publishing, the daily death rate in Quebec was twice as high as the one in Florida.)
Oh yeah that's another maddening episode. Every single media outlet here in quebec was obsessed by sweden and florida,and was doing some soviet tier governement praising while we had worse numbers than both and some of the worst daily stats per capita.
Also I totally agree on the canadian apologetics. It's really up there with some of the worst. A part from maybe the cognitive dissonance I've seen with Europeans grandstanding on racism in the USA (but don't talk to them about the Roma or moroccans or Muslims or albanians or... etc though, its different & they have totally valid reasons to hate them!).
This is the country that freelyadmitted to a genocide (and a currently occuring one at that) which caused just a bit of controversy, which I guess is good right if we are the worlds first to self declare a genocide? Except that we just... didn't do anything about it. Like we recognized it and flew the flags down for a bit, and that's all you need for a currently occuring genocide. The real debate is obviously talking about how bad american society is at dealing with race relations. 4 years later and the genocide is apparenly still ongoing and no on in government has been prosecuted or penalized, or even lost a siege in parliement over it.
And it is unfortunate that many Canadians do not understand that they are living in a state in which the parliament can be suspended by the unelected representative of the Queen (prorogation -- the same issue that led to Australia deciding they wanted to change their constitution) and that the not withstanding clause makes a mockery of the Charter.
Hopefully this wakes a few people up and gives some new impetus to the reform movements.
If you read the act itself, it's a measured approach to give the government limited powers for a limited time specifically because regular powers failed.
We as Canadians don't want to give the government these powers all the time, so that's why we have an escape hatch here to maintain our democracy. It is a great approach and many of us are proud of it.
Here in Victoria, Australia, we had similar emergency powers which were only valid for a couple of months.
In practice, the government simply kept voting to extend its emergency powers until it passed a piece of legistlation that allowed it to keep the relevant powers from the emergencies act indefinitely.
This. Invoking the Act in Canada was a blatantly political move, and they will not easily give up such powers once they get a taste of them. As is always the case with government.
While I'm definitely wary of government overreach and not really a fan of the Pandemic management bill the Vic government passed to replace the use of state of emergency powers, at least this bill did say that its provisions could only be used if the state premier and health minister declared a "state of pandemic", and also the bill was heavily modified from its original reading after criticism from the legal profession and negotiation with the state opposition.
So in actual reality those state of emergency powers to compel lockdowns, quarantine people and compel business to shut were NOT extended indefinitely, the government wrote them into legislation designed to cope with the current situation, and specified that they could only be used in a pandemic situation and NOT indefinitely.
Yes before you say it the government could amend the bill again before the state of pandemic is declared over, or pass more draconian legislation or try and do anything it feels like. In the end it comes down to if you think the government is acting in good faith to do what is best for the population or not, and I can't think of much evidence they are actually acting in bad faith or otherwise misusing their powers.
The situation in Canada is not the same, I very much do not like the idea of freezing people's bank accounts without oversight or recourse.
Any reasonable person would not consider the suspension of due process in response to peaceable protests “a measured approach”. Due process, along with equal protections of the law, are about as fundamental to a lawful society as any rights afforded by a representative government.
The Patriot Act had a timer built in years, not days. That, coupled with foreign intrigue that kept the velocity of interest ongoing (and endless threats -some valid, some not- from said foreign actors) made extending the PA easier for a mostly neo-conservative foreign policy establishment.
It also started expiring (in sections) in 2005, with more and more being sunset through the last 2020 window. I'm not actually sure how many of it's provisions still stand, but they are a much smaller subset than the massive umbrella of powers initially approved in 2001.
It's a harder sell with a small group of noisy Peterbilt drivers in a 30 day window.
> I'm not actually sure how many of it's provisions still stand, but they are a much smaller subset than the massive umbrella of powers initially approved in 2001.
I'd be curious as to how many of those powers simply got spun out into other covering legislation/banking law. I suspect quite a few.
Particularly in the freezing of suspicious funds, AML/KYC, banking secrecy, etc. If anything I think we've ramped up the regulation and lack of due process to 11 more than de-escalated.
it's a representative democracy filled with power-hungry people. the dynamics that would cause "temporary" laws to be renewed infinitely is the same. it's not like it's some quirk/loophole like filibusterers. if anything the more pragmatic (for lack of a better word) approach (as opposed to absolutist in the US) to freedom compared to the US makes it even more likely that authoritarian measures will remain.
What amazes me is that you can pass a measure that strips the rights of the citizens with less than a super majority of 2/3 or even 3/4. This is a mockery of democracy.
The NDP (left wing) party ended up supporting the emergencies act in parliament a few days after it was put in place by the Liberals. That provided them with a majority support to get 185-151 so about 55%.
The only party against it was Conservatives and I believe Bloc Quebcios.
I’m talking about how some simple majority to strip citizens of basic rights it’s not what you expect of a country that pretends to be Democratic state. 50% + 1 vote is not a mandate for anything much less unlawful violations of your citizens human rights.
As an amusing side note, "50% plus 1" is on its own a bit of a loaded phrase in Canada. Some argue that is enough of a majority for an entire province to secede via referendum.
I don't agree with that either. I don't view the tyranny of the simple majority in any favourable light especially now that everything in every country of the west is more and more polarised.
In fact I would prefer parliaments to be elected by citizen lottery and do away with all the political class at every level.
I’m not sure what rights Canadians have but something sounds wrong when they will freeze your bank account before even telling you what you’ve been accused of, let alone given you a chance to defend yourself.
Yes, we absolutely do. Smaller protests are ongoing right now in Ottawa by the same group(s) that set up at parliament. They're totally legal, because they're not breaking any laws.
The big hoopla down on Wellington _was_ breaking _many_ laws. The municipality was unable to disperse it with the resources at hand, and so voila, emergencies act.
Thanks. I've been so curious about this - the news gives the opposite impression. I haven't been able to find any news media about ongoing legal protests in Ottawa (ie today/yesterday/Sunday). Do you know of any?
A smaller demonstration outside the War Museum was ongoing Sunday and Monday [1], I think there were like 3 people left there today. The authorities did not interfere since the protest was peaceful and lawful.
Many of the more hardcore members of the convoy have moved just outside of town to Arnprior and a nearby truckstop. [2][3]
No, but if you are knowingly committing crimes as part of your protest, that falls under civil disobedience, which assumes you are willing to "do the time" for your crimes.
It's not typically expected that you commit crimes in the name of a cause and then just go home and live your life normally.
> proclaim that voting against the amendment will result in a new election.
This is the expected behaviour and boon of having minority governments. When the government does something Canada doesn't like, a new election gets called
Canadian States of Emregency Acts must still comport with due process.
“ Under the Emergencies Act, a declaration of an emergency by the Cabinet must be reviewed by Parliament.[33] Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill of Rights, and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
Which is meaningless considering the chart allows for almost everything inside of it to be either suspended (as per section 1) or outright ignored even outside of an emergency (not-withstanding clause). So yes it's not reassuring for an emergency law to have to follow the charter that explicitly allows for almost anything in cases where it's needed (such as government declared emergencies...).
The joys of having a "living constitution" where nothing is really set in stone and almost every right in the charter of rights can be just essentially ignored because of the very first section of said charter.
Shouldn't it be illegal for a political party to force any MP vote on any matter? The MP was voted in to represent the people, not the political party.
I guess it's a race to the bottom and impossible to prevent coercion. I just wish there was a better way.
But Michael Chong did get a bill through reminding MPs they can turf their leader, and it just got exercised for the first time. And some parts of the Conservative party are aghast that the lowly representatives of people overturned the will of the party.
> People getting hung up on the text of the bill forget that it's merely an Act of Parliament, and thus can easily be amended or replaced via a simple majority vote.
“Recognition and declaration of rights and freedoms
1 It is hereby recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist without discrimination by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex, the following human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely,
(a) the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law;
(b) the right of the individual to equality before the law and the protection of the law;
Canadian constitutional law is esoteric and insanely complicated so the bill of rights you cited is not actually part of the constitution at all but can sometimes maybe be used since it's still in effect even if it's been superceded by the charter of rights (that is actually part of the constitution). The bill of rights preceded the charter by 2 decades, and didn't have the problematic clauses that makes it completely neuter itself.
>Although the Bill of Rights remains in effect, many of its provisions were superseded by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. And unlike the Bill of Rights, the Charter is part of the Constitution — the highest law of the land.
>The Charter can be limited by the notwithstanding clause, also known as the override clause. Section 33 permits federal, provincial and territorial governments to temporarily bypass Charter rights in section 2 and sections 7 to 15.
Section 1 (probably what would make almost any emergency measure stand in court since "reasonable limits" is almost always judged in favor of what the state deems is reasonable) says:
>1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society
Section 33 (Not-withstanding clause, not used in this case but just goes to show how worthless the charter is as a bill of rights) :
>33. Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 [those sections make up for most of the core basic human rights]
A few hours ago, the government revoked the act. So while there are many things that could have been done to extend / abuse it, they don't seem likely to happen.
I'm curious about what comes out of the deliberations about whether it was appropriate to invoke the Emergencies Act, but at the same time, I feel like critics are engaging in doomsday porn when they characterize bank account freezing as some sort of indication of dystopic things to come.
From the accounts I've heard, I can't really tell what the protestors were hoping to realistically accomplish. Pissing off a whole city for a whole month doesn't exactly have a great track record with regards to swaying policy.
According to polls, most canadians opposed the protest. That doesn't mean they necessarily have an opinion on whether invoking of the act was appropriate or not. I think most canadians are sensible enough to let the lawyers figure that out than adding noise via their uninformed hot takes. My personal take is that canadians as a society just don't like gratuitously loud whining and would much rather get back to peacefulness.
I think the police response speaks volumes about canadian values and what they represent, regardless of what laws say on paper: some people actually criticized the police response for being too "soft" on protesters but it was a good example that canadian police always prioritizes de-escalation[0]. They focused on reducing the risk of violence from breaking out even if it meant standing down; and arrests were largely related to dangerous threats (e.g. weapons) or gross disregard for public peace/safety.
People keep making parallels to US politics, but one big difference is that Canadians just aren't as polarized as to disagree on core principles, i.e. there's much less inclination for political parties to double down into increasingly polarized, extremist tribes. So even if it turns out that invoking the Emergencies Act was a bad call this time, it doesn't necessarily follow that Canada will devolve into a tyranny.
Various internet bills have been attempted to be passed by the Canadian government in past years. Despite regular uproar and push back, the attempts continue. Based on the current situation it might not entirely be a surprise if new tools come out of this, either mysterious and cloaked, or out in the open.
The question in some minds will be ensuring if existing tools and capabilities are not used, including existing enforcement of laws, what is the point of creating new ones? Any holes in today's legislation might have been the rushed legislation of the past.
Occupy Wall Street was started by a group of organized Canadians and they blocked access to NYSE facilities. OWS was obviously an occupation (it’s right there in the name), but the better question is: was OWS a protest, too? If so, why can’t this be called one as well?
There are generally more parallels between OWS and the truckers than people are willing to recognize, because there’s been a hell of an inversion: if you supported OWS 10 years ago you probably don’t like the truckers today and if you like the truckers you probably weren’t for OWS 10 years ago. There are a handful of Tim Pools that like both, and there are elites that disliked both, but the average person has to do some gymnastics.
All that I ask is that everyone is consistent: if OWS is a protest, then this is too. If you don’t like that Americans funded the truckers, you have to be willing to call out that OWS took place in NYC but formed from a Canadian nonprofit.
All that I ask is that everyone is consistent: if OWS is a protest, then this is too.
I have no idea why whether this event is a protest or not is considered the key question. Both movements could be protests and still be diametrically opposed in aims, approaches and broad political direction.
Protests often go beyond the legal bounds of free speech. Yeah. But obviously go far enough beyond legal bounds and you may find yourself in jail. And if you've done that in a fashion that's mostly oriented to harming the average person, then you may well deserve to be in jail by a strong concensus. But sure, you're still protesting.
Edit: A simple way to put that occurs to me is, sure, "people on the left support some protests that break some laws for some causes they consider important". But that doesn't mean they would or anyone would support "any protest that breaks any law for anything the protesters consider important"
Having been around OWS: I cannot recall a single time when NYC’s municipal functions and/or the activities of ordinary citizens were affected by the protests. The OWS protests were famously contained to a few small blocks, in a non-residential area, and constituted more of a “live-in.”
FiDi's residential population is about 60k now, which is triple what it was in the early 2000s (and probably around double what it was around OWS). Notably the US census includes Battery Park City in FiDi, which significantly skews the numbers versus the business streets (where the protest was).
By contrast, most of the residential neighborhoods in Manhattan easily clear 100k people, and are not as segregated in terms of business and residential streets.
If it hadn’t been for the honking and intimidation, I bet the party could still be going on. But the truckers imposed themselves on too many people to tolerate. They seemed to take pleasure in making Ottawa residents miserable. They had limited ability or willingness to police themselves which OWS at least tried to do.
> In particular, it was about giving the government of Canada the permanent power to freeze, without trial or legal recourse, all the bank accounts and other assets of anyone it decides was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ in an ‘illegal protest.’
Is this actually true? According to [0] "The Declaration expires after 30 days unless an extension is confirmed within specific timelines by both the House of Commons and the Senate.". I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.
While I generally agree with the alarm raised by this article, I find it does itself a disservice by exaggerating and citing to Americans with, charitably, a passing understanding of Canadian law and government.
If people would like a dispassionate/neutral reading of the legal obligations imposed by the invocation of the Emergencies Act, I can recommend:
- a summary by Osler, a prestigious Canadian law firm [1]
- the order itself [2]
- the regulations themselves [3]
They are bad enough on their own without embellishment.
For additional context, I have never voted for the Liberal party. Federally, I have donated to and voted for Conservative and Green candidates my entire life. My current MP (a Green MP), voted against the Emergencies Act. I approved of that vote. But it is just absolutely bizarre to me to see people comparing Trudeau to Hitler, Stalin and Mao, as is done in the punk6529 Twitter thread that is embedded in this article. There is plenty to criticize without undermining yourself by using these stupidly emotive comparisons.
In addition this interview by en ex-CSIS (Canadian spycops agency) employee suggests that the funding is getting to the organizers by some means other than those which go directly through payment processors. It would be interesting if these measures were also actually ineffective. I was a bit skeptical of her claim that bitcoin ATMs in Ottawa were a likely source though:
I've commented on HN, mainly on controversial threads, for years. This is establishing status quo. When we are discussing an unprecedented ability to freeze users out of the financial system -- which the article accurately describes as a threat to constitutional democracy -- and someone claims that their PM isn't a dictator, their other dictatorial actions become relevant.
I didn't claim he wasn't a dictator. I claimed comparing him to Stalin, Mao and Hitler was bizarre. I still think that's bizarre, although I credit that some people may disagree sincerely. For me, it's bizarre because I think Stalin, Mao and Hitler are primarily known for being totalitarian rulers who each are responsible for the deaths of millions to tens of millions of people.
Trudeau, on the other hand, recently won re-election in what is generally accepted to have been a free and fair election and which was, in large part, a referendum on his handling of the coronavirus. This is relevant because his invocation of the Emergencies Act is related to protests about how he has handled coronavirus.
Even so, his invocation of the Emergencies Act was successful only because, in a minority parliament, he convinced another party to support him. Additionally, Doug Ford, a provincial premier of a third, different, party requested him to invoke it.
That's just... not dictatorial, totalitarian or mass murder-y to me. And again, I say this as someone who does not like Trudeau, does not generally like the Liberal party, and has never supported them.
The USA has a per capita death rate 300% that of Canada's. We have worked together here to keep one another safe, often at great personal sacrifice, and it has worked quite well all things considered. This is an expression of mutual solidarity and civic spirit, not evidence of stalinism.
I think this emergency act stuff is very bad, but Canada's response to Covid has been head and shoulders better than the USA and the death counts show it. I'm happy, as an American, to live up here where human life is valued.
Does that really matter though? The people whose bank accounts have been frozen won't automatically get their accounts back after 30 days, will they?
(And even if they do, 30 days is still a really long time not to have access to money, aside from whatever cash you happened to have on you at the time.)
It appears that accounts could have been frozen for as little as $20 according to the Finance Ministry, banks have apparently started unfreezing those accounts. Apparently the $20 freezes only happened rarely.
“Although not impossible that someone who gave $20 be captured and have their bank account frozen, I find that scenario…you know I think it would be in rare circumstances.”
In my opinion it's quite a leap to go from what Chrystia Freeland said in that video to "permanent power to freeze, without trial or legal recourse, all the bank accounts and other assets of anyone it decides was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ in an ‘illegal protest.'". Of the 3 measures she mentioned it isn't even clear which ones are supposed to be brought up to be made permanent and "Sharing of information between law enforcing and financial services" doesn't even sound like it's about the "freezing" of accounts. Did I miss anything here?
I think there was something missed. The specific "tools" that Freeland is referencing ARE the powers to freeze those bank accounts. That IS the major tool that the government did not have.
I understand why Freeland would not want to outright say "we want the permanent power to freeze funds with no recourse" - but that's the only conclusion I could reach based on that clip.
Keep in mind, the government had the power to seize/freeze assets, before this Emergency Act, as long as they had a court order. However, that low bar seemed to be too high a hurdle so the Liberals want to make this permanent.
The government already has these powers, but crowdfunding and cryptocurrency were missing. There's no good reason why we shouldn't include them in the existing laws.
There's no good reason that they couldn't have passed those measures on their own, without the power of freezing accounts with no due-process. This assuming that there are some "reasonable powers" they needed, which I don't agree with.
Further, the government always had the power to freeze the destination accounts as long as they were at a Canadian bank and had a court order. This is the only distinction.
The thing she is referring to making permanent is making FINTRAC cover crowdsourcing and payment provider platforms. That seems like standard government regulation stuff.
At the end of the video that you linked, she explicitly says that some of the emergency powers (suspending insurance for commercial vehicles involved in blockades) should not be available to governments in ordinary times.
The FINTRAC inclusion of crowdsourcing is clearly a response to foreigners outside of Canada sending millions of dollars to fund an occupation of Canada's capital city. This is a delicate issue: on the one hand political contributions are a form of speech, on the other hand I don't think a country needs to tolerate foreign political extremists from rich countries dumping money into domestic anti-government movements bent on forcing the gov't to resign etc.
Ezra Levant is a polemicist who frequently misstates or fabricates evidence. You shouldn't trust him. He's essentially Canada's Tucker Carlson. He's trying to be provocative, not do journalism.
Like how the USA's PATRIOT Act was supposed to sunset after 3 years but has been extended every 3 years forever? Canada isn't the USA but it's not that different.
> I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.
Label any protest you don't like an "illegal protest". Then as long as there's less than one such protest every 30 days, it's not "permanent"... Yet it is.
Virtually all protests are "illegal". The problem is that the truckers figured out a way to make an illegal protest where the fines / jailtime is minimal compared to the effectiveness of the protest methodology.
Honking a horn carries very little penalty but is massively annoying if done in front of the PM's house. Parking your truck infront of a border crossing is similarly not very penalized, yet killing 25% of the trade between two countries is very damaging to the gov't.
The real reason we never saw these measures before is because of how brutally effective they are while being entirely non-violent.
This is very well put. The only acceptable protests seem to be those which are toothless. Somehow these people found an asymmetric cost situation and now the laws will be updated to take account of this edge case.
It's about whether there is a legitimate state of emergency. Therefore, the context of millions of people dying is relevant. But, you're right, their cause does seem rather counterproductive in this light.
In BC more people died of elevated levels of overdoses (eg. just what was above average) than COVID.
As of this post, 36,116 and not millions of people died of COVID in Canada, and the removal of vaccine mandates / mask mandates are inline with the recommendations of the Chief Public Health Officer. The people were pretty much protesting to get Trudeau to follow the medical recommendations of the Health Officer.
In most countries where masks and vaccine mandates have been eliminated, infections have gone down. Denmark's peak was the last day of restrictions.
Those countries already have > 90% vaccination rates, enough for the vaccines to be useful. They can get rid of their mandates because they statically are no longer necessary.
Yes, many of those countries have lower vaccination rates than Canada. 84% vs 81% in the case of Denmark. I wholeheartedly agree with you that our mandates are no longer necessary.
>Is this actually true? According to [0] "The Declaration expires after 30 days unless an extension is confirmed within specific timelines by both the House of Commons and the Senate.". I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.
This is true. They have frozen the bank accounts of hundreds and you cannot do anything about it. You never got due process, there is no redress from the courts because you dont have a bank account to hire a lawyer.
Oh yes, poor Briane [0] from Chilliwack, single mother, minimum wage job, made $50 donation to the convoy. Of course that's the person the PM is targeting here. No source, no proof, nothing. This (unfortunately) is my MP and it's sad to say that he's contributing to the echo chamber of made up stories for the sole purpose of making people angry and voting for him.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You can make your substantive points without doing that.
Unless the gov't is willing to publish the frozen accounts and the amounts any debate on what's going on will be lacking in facts that will be verified by the regime. We're going to have to wait at least 30 days for the first report to find out what's going on, we may never know.
Perhaps this is why freezing an account generally requires a court order, my guess is that no judge would approve based on the current jurisprudence and facts of the case.
> This (unfortunately) is my MP and it's sad to say that he's contributing to the echo chamber of made up stories for the sole purpose of making people angry and voting for him.
I said this about Mark Strahl, my MP, so no I didn't make the same "attack", sorry. As of now this story seems fabricated so I'll keep trying to hold my MP accountable.
This is incorrect. The lawyer is not confirming the story that people are having accounts frozen for donating. You'll note in that tweet they make zero reference to those donating.
It says they did provide a list of influencers, so perhaps they are just freezing the accounts of those who tweeted. I'm sure many of those who donated are also online influencers voicing their support for the freedom convoy.
I clicked on the link but it doesn’t seem to claim that he is representing anyone whose account was frozen for a donation. He states some of his clients are truck drivers/owners involved in the protest.
"In an e-mail about Mr. Strahl’s tweet, mistakenly forwarded to The Globe, an Ottawa police officer said they had sifted through the donor list and found two “Briannes,” neither of whom lived in B.C. “The information posted is false,” the e-mail said." https://twitter.com/MariekeWalsh/status/1496102089562468353
Any power given to government will be abused by them. It's sad that many Canadians support these clearly dangerous and totalitarian actions from their "leader".
Did you notice how "freedom" became a swear word over the last 5-6 years? With all these "muh freedoms", "what exact freedom have you lost?", "freedom of speech don't protect you from anything" it seems like any movement that fights for any "freedom" will be labeled as terrorist/nazi in next few years.
History repeats itself, and I'm sick of it. My country of origin and my country where I grew up, both turned to totalitarian hellholes, and now it's Canada's turn.
>Did you notice how "freedom" became a swear word over the last 5-6 years?
Because it's about "freedom" and not freedom.
Remember when the US called french fries freedom fries because France wasn't part of the coalition of the willing?
That's the same freedom.
Freedom also means responsibility, but some just want to do what ever they want and as soon as somebody demands from them to take responsibility they cry freedom.
People were drafted in wars and got killed and these guys whine about some pokes.
I want my freedom too but these guys showed me that that will never happen. I underestimated the number of stupid people.
We live in a society, your personal space and freedom intersects with the personal space and freedom of others. So yo have to compromise and jab is nothing too demanding. Especially when billions of people have already done it.
How much time is needed to jab everyone and how much for losing weight?
And if you are too overweight you are excluded from some activities and medical operations.
Just compare how much freedom was taken by things like the Patriot Act compared to mandatory vaccinations, not to mention the higher death toll of corona. A long it's only the freedom of others there is no problem but when it comes to themselves, they channel their inner William Wallace
You're moving the goalposts. If we're going to enact policy for the betterment of society let us not stop at jabs. Let us enact anti-obesity mandates. We'll check your weight at the entrance to bars and restaurants.
> Any power given to government will be abused by them.
This assertion that the government cannot do anything good, by virtue of being the government, is kinda why the kids gloves are coming off between the Canadian government and these protestors.
What exactly should the government response be to a group of people who demand the entire government be thrown out, and are going to ruin the majority of the populations lives until it happens? Are they supposed to sit there and accept that they’re a naughty little government who can never do anything right so they need to be quiet and go away?
For the entire rest of your comment I can’t respond until you let me know what was the appropriate response for the government here. So far you’ve implied they should have done nothing, and explicitly threw treason out as another possibility. Is there any step the government could have taken that was appropriate in your view other than do nothing, charge treason, or capitulate entirely to the protestors?
The obvious steps were to send the police in the same manner charging the protestors with the same charges. The joint operation doesn't require the emergency act.
The prime minister could have said sorry to everyone he called deplorable.
The federal government of Canada did not have the legal authority to command the local police. That would have been illegal and even more authoritarian an act.
> The prime minister could have said sorry to everyone he called deplorable.
Do you really believe the protestors would go home if they got an apology for their hurt feelings?
Well A: I thought we were talking about the EA that got implemented by the federal government and is being used to freeze bank accounts, if you meant the police then take in mind that I was referencing the feds in my responses.
B: I thought it was about mask and vaccine mandates at first, and then moved onto dissolving the government, but now it’s because they feel slighted? These may all be reasons that the group has said but that makes them sound a lot more like a disorganized group with constantly moving goal posts that can’t actually be reasoned with
When you're disrupting major cities with your "fun party" it is completely acceptable to assume trying to interrupt peoples daily lives and livelihood is a bad act and it's perfectly acceptable to deal with that.
The many people protesting were vaxxed and fully vaxxed. Many are concerned their children are being forced.
The one thing I don't understand.
The people who would die over the right of a women to choose to have a baby are the same ones who want to prevent a women from choosing to get the vax or not. If those people win the vax debate do they lose the abortion debate? The state may have good reasons in an unpopulated country like Canada to want to increase the birthrate.
This isn't about children, many countries or a least parts of countries have mandatory vaccinations for children.
"Ontario and New Brunswick require immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella immunization, while Manitoba requires a measles vaccination."
And you can turn this around, many of those who try to force women fo give birth are against mandatory vaccinations.
Guess what has a longer and deeper effects?
A 30second jab or raising a child?
BTW many of the anti abortion activists don't care about children after they were born.
Free education, healthcare, school lunch? Not on their watch.
> people who demand the entire government be thrown out
That's not their demand? They want the government to stop imposing vax mandates and lockdowns. I'm sure a lot of people also want Trudeau out, but I doubt if they lifted the restrictions like the UK did that the truckers would still stick around.
I don't think one person gets to show up and take claim of the movement and make it about something else all of a sudden.
It started because the Canadian government was requiring truckers to be vaccinated or else they would lose their jobs. If they get their way, the government says "fine you don't need the vaccine," and the protests continue to stick around then the "what are they supposed to do" argument might hold water. But so far the only government response is to call them racist/transphobic/islamophobic/whatever buzzword gets you good PR.
I mean I’d agree that you can’t just show up and claim you lead the movement, but she showed up, organized truckers to get to Ottawa, and ran the fund that got millions in donations for the convoy. She may not be too boss but she certainly has some non trivial representation of the group.
> If they get their way, the government says "fine you don't need the vaccine," and the protests continue to stick around then the "what are they supposed to do" argument might hold water.
That’s just capitulating to their incorrect ideas that covid isn’t real or isn’t dangerous and the vaccines are, which is a non starter. So assuming that they aren’t going to capitulate to the protestors what should the government be doing? This still feels very low touch compared to how most other protests are handled
> That’s just capitulating to their incorrect ideas that covid isn’t real or isn’t dangerous and the vaccines are
Stop conflating anti-vaxx with anti-mandate. There are plenty of vaccinated people who participated in the protests because they think mandates are a step too far. The mandates for truckers were the original trigger for the protests, and the primary demand was to remove them.
I didn’t at first but the majority of “anti mandate” folk I run into then start slipping things into the conversation like “the vaccines don’t even work” which makes me think the anti mandate movement is just anti vaxxers with a mask on.(pun not intended)
I also happen to think being legitimately anti mandate is an incorrect idea about how covid and viruses spread as we’ve seen leaving it up to people to decide means they just make our hospital networks break down.
It’s pretty much a distinction without a difference to me when looking at anti vaxxers, anti maskers, or anti mandate groups
Anecdotical evidence only, but the people in my country that I know to be anti-mandate are all triple-vaccinated. We are quite used with vaccines, we kind of understand to some degree how they work and we decided to use it, same as masks and other measures, but most of these people are anti-mandates.
We lived under a Communism regime and many people died fighting it, some of us still remember and are marked for life by a fear of government mandates of any kind. Younger people don't remember, so we are also split on this matter, but there is a simple explanation for that.
It was part of their demands. They laid it all out in the MOU before the protests started.
> CTV cited Bauder saying that he hoped the signed MoU would convince Elections Canada to trigger an election, which is not constitutionally possible. In this pseudolegal document, CU called on the "SCGGC" to cease all vaccine mandates, reemploy all employees terminated due to vaccination status, and rescind all fines imposed for non-compliance with public health orders.[46] If this failed, the MoU called on the "SCGGC" to dissolve the government, and name members of the CU to form a Canadian Citizens Committee (CCC), which is beyond the constitutional powers of either the Governor General or the Senate.
They released an MOU at the start of this that explicitly called for the resignation of the current government if they were not willing to immediately lift the Covid19 mandates. In the case of a refusal to lift the mandates, it demanded that a new government be formed of representatives from the Senate and, incredibly, representatives from the convoy.
> This assertion that the government cannot do anything good
I didn't say that. I literally said is that government can and will abuse any power that citizens give up to them. Also, that power and lost freedoms are extremely hard to take back (you're welcome to find counterexamples). Therefore we (citizens) must be very alert every time when government tries to do that.
I interpreted your phrase and using the word “will” as, “will always happen” and not “can’t be rolled back if the government does start abusing it”, but I understand what your saying now.
I think I generally agree but I’m this instance it didn’t look the Canadian federal government really overreached. I think it might have been a better look if they had gone after the police chief first who was refusing to enforce the law, and try and get local government to do the enforcement but after three weeks in a residential area I can see how leadership would be concerned about escalation
It has become a pejorative precisely because it has been bandied about stupidly by people who aren't always arguing in good faith. At best, it's often invoked in an unsophisticated manner that assumes that individual freedom supersedes any other public good--i.e. during Covid.
In the American context, there's also a lot of hypocrisy on the right in terms of using that word, e.g. celebrating post 911 stuff like The Patriot Act and No Fly lists and Guantanamo, not caring about the conditions of immigration detention, but then bitching about having to wear cloth on one's face sometimes. Right-wingers literally cheered Joe Arpaio saying he runs concentration camps. So long as great atrocities befall minorities, they don't care. If they get minorly inconvenienced --> somehow it's a big deal.
I'd say more, but it's hard to discuss properly on phone. I would say there are reasonable libertarian concerns about this bill and Covid policies and a bunch of other stuff, but if you're wondering why so many of us reflexively distrust such arguments, you have to look at the cultural and political context in which we grew up. You're not seeing the full picture, to say the least.
I liked and upvoted your comment. This could be true, and yet it could also simultaneously be true that the people being reflexively skepticism about “freedom” don’t sufficiently understand the cultural and historical context in which that concept was formed - the history of struggles against tyranny in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example.
This is the risk in protesting. Authorities have never been nice to protestors. Protesting has always carried the risk of assault and the loss of livelihood, wealth, freedom, or life. So before protesting, you need to ask yourself if what your protesting for is worth it.
The state is fucking powerful. After all, the state is the one in charge of checking the state's power. If you piss off enough people, or merely the wrong people, you may discover that your rights only extend so far as other people are willing to protect them. The difference here is that most protestors are punished via ass-kicking, seizure of personal belongings, a few nights being humiliated in a jail cell, and a bunch of fines.
The people whose lives were interrupted by this are pissed off and out for blood. And Trudeau is going to give it to them, and be heralded as a hero while doing so. Especially after the perceived police incompetence in the matter (by failing to dole out the standard ass-kicking-jail-fine punishment).
I live in Ottawa. This was not a protest, it was an 21 day occupation, blocking the city core and removing citizen's ability to sleep in their own homes due to the constant excessive noise, (often at ear-damaging levels) or leave without harassment. Businesses in the area could not open.
So to compare these occupiers with typical protestors does not make sense. Talking with other locals, the last time someone could remember a non-peaceful protest in Ottawa was around the beginning of the Iraq war, aside from when about a dozen BLM protestors occupied a single intersection overnight and were all arrested on day 2 of their attempt to keep the intersection shut down.
Occupy Wall Street was a protest and an "occupation". CHAZ was literally people "occupying" a part of Seattle. Both of those protests were a good thing, but they were still protests. You don't get to decide what is and what isn't a protest just because you disagree with the message or the methods and the government's rhetoric in the past few weeks (calling it terrorism, occupation, foreign backed agitation) is very dangerous and should not be encouraged.
It's literally straight out of a third world country's dictator textbook on how to discredit any opposition, especially the cold War Era style insanity around "foreign backing!!" by... Americans. I guess at least they didn't blame the Russians this time
Occupy Wall Street was a protest and an "occupation". CHAZ was literally people "occupying" a part of Seattle. Both of those protests were a good thing, but they were still protests.
Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement basically just took over city parks and fed people. Occupy was basically a good. CHAZ is a kind of rolling disaster that involved over-anxious security killing a guy who'd stolen someone's car. As a leftist who knows people who were involved with it, I would say CHAZ was a very bad thing.
Of course, a democratic society has to decide what sorts of disruptions are acceptable and which have to be stopped. Of course such a society is going to do that. Otherwise, the first extremist cult to field enough armed people to seize the state will win.
...just because you disagree with the message or the METHODS(emphasis added)...
If the trucker convoy was basically thugs who were breaking the law because they thought they could and because they thought doing this would force the rest of the nation to bow to their demands, I don't think anyone has an obligation to have the least respect for their efforts.
The truckers seems vastly more peaceful than the people involved in CHAZ, but government should still not be able to freeze their accounts. That is just insane.
I think it's necessary to draw the distinction between this occupation, and other protests, because other protests do not greatly impact the ongoing lives of random unrelated citizens in the city who just happen to live in the area for weeks on end.
So sure, we can call both protests, but the important thing is that this was also a foreign-funded occupation. So there is no value in comparing this with the protests for both left- and right- wing causes that Ottawa sees on a weekly basis. Protests that get a permit, last an afternoon, and then go home and lets people live their lives without being harassed.
>because other protests do not greatly impact the ongoing lives of random unrelated citizens in the city who just happen to live in the area for weeks on end.
From my experience this is not true. Protests mostly involve discomfort to normal people.Be it BLM, occupy wall street, students manifestations, railroads blocking, etc
Maybe the scales of some are different, but calling this a "foreign-founded occupation" is disingenuous.
I think the trucker protest was unique (and different from OWS, BLM) due to it deliberately targeting ordinary, unrelated citizens instead of the government. It would have been more like other protests if they blockaded and blew their horns at Trudeau's front lawn or Parliament or Big Business or something, but instead the protesters specifically went after the wellbeing of ordinary Canadians. All protests "involve discomfort" to normal people, but this one uniquely targeted them.
EDIT: This is not letting individual BLM protestors (who did deliberately target private businesses) off the hook, but the movement itself did not specifically call for belligerence against unrelated citizens.
I just want to address the comment about most protests involving discomfort to normal people. I live and work in the downtown core of Ottawa. I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear that the city is a focal point for protests and has had many of them, large and small, over the years. I completely agree that protests often include some measure of discomfort for random, unrelated citizens.
However, I can tell you that there has never been a protest even remotely close to the number of torments this protest inflicted upon the residents of the city. I personally know numerous people who were harassed verbally and physically while walking in the streets simply for wearing a mask. A downtown mall was forced to close for multiple weeks due to protesters refusing to follow masking rules. Think of the retail staff who lost out on multiple weeks of pay. There was an attempt to set fire to a residential building with the main lobby door being taped shut. Fireworks were being set off on city streets downtown. Extremely loud horns were being sounded throughout all hours of the day and night, including train and boat horns that could be heard throughout the downtown core. People were prevented from buying groceries within a reasonable distance due to the grocery store having to close; the workers having been harassed while working by protesters. Numerous small retail shops in the downtown were forced to close their doors due to protester harassment and reduced traffic as people largely felt unsafe in the downtown core. There was an instance of protesters harassing a homeless shelter into providing them food.
This was not discomfort. This was a complete prevention of the ability to feel safe in their homes and neighbourhood for a large swath of Ottawa residents who had nothing to do with the mandates. Many people were materially affected by this and had no way of escaping beyond leaving the city.
> "complete prevention of the ability to feel safe"
Kind of a hard thing to prove. I don't feel safe due to climate destruction. Can we invoke the Emergencies Act against the Canadian fossil fuel industry and the automotive parts manufacturers to make me feel better?
I really don't think it was that hard to prove. If you look up the injunction against the horns, it specifically cited the volume being well into what the law considered harassment. The fact that it was granted and extended shows that the judge felt the people of downtown as a whole were being harassed.
If you can get the majority of people to agree that they feel unsafe due to climate destruction and neither the municipal nor provincial governments respond accordingly, then, by all means, invoke the emergency act. I'd certainly be on board.
They protested against vaccination mandates and the store closure was due to government policy. To be honest, this sound very peaceful for a protest all in all.
Feeling unsafe is often invoked lately to restrict the rights of others. I don't believe this is sufficient in a larger context.
Yes, what's your point? That gotcha is really annoying, there's no reason to pretend canada and the USA aren't extremely interlinked. Canadians have never been shy of comparing canada to the USA whenever it suits us, so it's funny to see how we are now pretending canada is completely unique and not comparable.
Also, I'm sure the CBC never talked about whats happening in the US but if they did they surely described CHAZ as terroristic occupation, not protests? Like do you think some canadians condemned those like they are condemning the current protests?
My point was about public opinion and hyperbolic media narratives, because it's abundantly clear that the reaction to this protest is hypocritical at best and unhinged at worse. Hence why I brought up CHAZ and OCCUPY (two movements that I fully supported )
If protests were "comfortable", then there would be no pressure for the government to do anything. The point of a protest is to make enough noise (heh) so the government is forced to react.
Look at protests like Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan with 200+ dead. If the Ukrainian people didn't protest at the levels they did, and occupy Kiev for as long as they did, would the government have done anything? I don't think anyone in Kiev was sleeping when people were building barricades and engaging in deadly firefights with the Ukrainian police & army.
I don't hold that exact viewpoint, so I don't feel the need to defend it.
There's varying levels of "uncomfortable", and a question of who is being made uncomfortable.
If a protest is permanently damaging the hearing of regular people who are not in positions of leadership for 21 days straight, and subjecting them to significant harassment, some of them a botched arson attempt, and a whole litany of other assaults as have been documented in Centertowne Ottawa, I would argue it is more akin to holding them hostage.
Fair enough. I can sympathize if you had to endure 3 weeks of loud noise. Frankly if I wasn't supportive of the Convoy, I would be pretty upset too.
One more thing I would say is that the fault for how long the "Occupation" went on for isn't entirely with the Convoy. With a large protest like this, it's up to the government to deal with, one way or another.
The authorities didn't take the right actions. They should either come out to negotiate with the protesters, or quickly utilise force to disperse them. Instead, they basically sat still for 3 weeks while Trudeau "fled" Ottawa to some undisclosed location.
So I would lay some blame on the government in its tardiness in addressing the Convoy, as part of the reason it went on for so long. You can't expect angry people who are determined to change government policy to just pack up and go home when the government told them to
Yeah the municipal government and police force were first to completely drop the ball. They didn't do their job and let our downtown become a parliament hill autonomous zone. Heck, they gave the convoy participants access to a city parking lot which was then set up as a forward operating base for their supply lines for the next 3 weeks.
If the police had managed this situation properly after the first weekend this would never have become an international issue. As a police force they basically completely failed to maintain order in the city, and that's a big part of why we required an eventual federal response to clean up the occupation that had free reign to establish itself for weeks.
I'm not a Trudeau supporter but I'm not sure what he should have done differently in this situation - he apparently had covid on the first weekend, is that what you're referring to about him fleeing? Anyways, this should have been handled by the municipal police force with adequate support from the provincial police force within the first week. I hope that the eventual federal review that comes with enacting the EA will find the root cause why our police force failed so hard.
When you organize a large, funded protest, internal organization, tactics, and policing are definitely your responsibility. Unleashing an incoherent mob is just vandalism.
ok, just want to say i’ve heard this before and this is what i really hate about protests.
You want politicians or big business to react but you’re pissing off small businesses and civilians. Even if I 100% agree with your protest, I don’t want you to blare loud music and block off roadways and generally be aggressive and obnoxious. In fact this kind of thing makes ordinary people go against you.
If you can’t target the politicians and big businesses directly, if you want to get the people’s support, bring attention to your issue. If it’s a serious issue people will take interest themselves. Once you some support, then you can go out and protest and lead a huge rally, but don’t blatantly piss off bystanders.
As I understand things, a factor in how this has played out is that local (Ottawa) police essentially threw up their hands and said they couldn't do anything - when it was a matter of those police basically being sympathetic.
Emergency powers were needed to force what would be the normal job of police.
I agree - this would not be international news if the police had managed the situation appropriately in the early days. What happened within OPS, nobody fully knows yet. But apparently by enacting the federal Emergencies Act, an in-depth review of the events leading up to requiring the act will be a part of the aftermath.
I also live in Ottawa, in fact in the downtown core. This was absolutely a protest. I didn't support the message they were pushing, but it was a protest. The horns were a nuisance (people ending up in the hospital unable to sleep) but they were a problem solved a little before the halfway mark. It's unfair to give the impression this was still a problem.
I wonder if the government would have taken the same steps if these people simply protested on the lawn of Parliament or some other area that didn't block people from living their lives. I suspect not but I'm just a random Canadian.
This comment is weird, it appears to be a rehashing of the populist argument "If you go against the majority then you deserve whatever happens to you", as an atheist living in a majority-muslim intolerant country, that's familiar.
And the kinds of people who say this are familiar too. They perceive themselves to be part of the majority (Or the "Right Side Of History", in other imaginations), they think it will never turn against them or - for that matter - that the people they're oppressing will never return the unpleasant favor and gang on them back.
All those countless centuries of history and people still haven't fully grasped that Power and Oppression are completely symmetric tools, totally blind to the identities of those wielding them or those they're used against. The tyranny you so gleefully cheer now is going to turn against you (or an equivalent one will be constructed by the ones you oppressed one day and used against you) and you won't be laughing then.
In a lot of countries, "the people are the state" is only nominally true. Special interests often carry the day, and anyway in a partisan environment devoid of principles we need to protect against moments of passion where a 51% majority can infringe on the rights of 49% (or in my country, a largely elite 10%--which helms universities and media institutions and so on--can use the state to push their ideology on the other 90%).
I agree with you on paper but have a really hard time viewing my current relationship with any State as that of which I have power. Nor do I see myself with any _limited State_ having any power. Nor do I see myself as having _any_ ability to legally inflict harm to others as the State has power to do.
I totally agree that democracy on paper says the People have control but I am not seeing that play out at any real scale.
True but people should be able to protest and make politicians uncomfortable, which is what happened here. If we can't hear the other side, we go down quickly.
Absolutely people have right to protest all they want, infact people are still protesting on side walks. But they don't have right to block whole city blocks for weeks, blocking paths of ambulances, jam 911 and block critical infrastructure.
You sort of have to, if you want to actually make an impact.
Look at what they did in Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan (200+ dead). If Ukrainian people resorted to peaceful protests, the pro-Russian government would have easily cracked down and suppressed the protests.
If you want another even more brutal example - look at the Tiananmen Protests. Do you think peaceful protest will convince an authoritarian communist government to magically give up its powers?
The government rarely listens to its people (yes that includes democratic countries). If you want the government to listen, you gotta make a lot of noise.
Thank you for that perspective, fully support your right to peaceful protest.
We live in a democracy with representatives. We may be approaching Kazakhstan but not there yet. Protests in Canada were allowed for weeks to go on without much interruption from government and there are still protests going on.
I am against mandates, against vaccine passports, also against debanking people. I would argue better approach in democracy is to call your representatives phone rather than jam 911. You can also vote them out in the next election (there is an election coming up in Ontario, Canada, if you feel that mandates are wrong make sure people running for election understand that you don't want mandates).
I hope we can see there is a way to peacefully coexist, by using tools available in democratic process.
I think this is reasonable, but it's also problematic when the subject of the protests invokes emergency powers to deal with his critics. That's not a precedent you want to set over people blocking streets, never mind the functionally weak position the government was attempting to defend (vaccine mandates).
I really wish that people would have protested without going overboard, the support would have grown a lot more. (Not making blanket statement that everyone who was part of protest went overboard)
I am not supportive of vaccine mandates and fully support people's right to control what is injected in their bodies. I don't support people getting fired because they are unvaccinated and all the other negative consequences of mandates.
We are in terrible and disappointing situation and can only hope that saner heads will prevail.
>This is the risk in protesting. Authorities have never been nice to protestors. Protesting has always carried the risk of assault and the loss of livelihood, wealth, freedom, or life. So before protesting, you need to ask yourself if what your protesting for is worth it.
This act has never been used before, it's predecessor was used only during serious war. This act being used against legitimate protest and then going forward banning all protest?
Like say you want to protest the government based on one side of the Ukraine war? You can't, that's illegal.
Say you want to go cover those illegal protests and report on it as a journalist? That's illegal.
>Especially after the perceived police incompetence in the matter (by failing to dole out the standard ass-kicking-jail-fine punishment).
The police couldn't touch the protest for weeks not because of inaction but because your right to protest is a human right. They required the national emergency to remove our right to protest in order to label the protest illegal.
>The police couldn't touch the protest for weeks not because of inaction but because your right to protest is a human right. They required the national emergency to remove our right to protest in order to label the protest illegal.
So you are saying under Canadian law, if you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads, destroying property, etc then Canadian police can't do anything? So if I go back in history and look at other protests in Canada like the ones against the pipelines for example, then I will see that the police didn't act against them?
>you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads
Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.
>destroying property
What is the property that was destroyed by the protest in question?
> Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.
Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.
Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.
I see this word used multiple times in people arguing against the protest, never with any details about the concrete instances of the supposed harassment. Noise is not harassment, any activity with a large group of people is going to annoy and disturb the place they happen to choose to congregate, this is not even specific to protests.
Actually, just to be clear, what exactly did the protestors do besides blocking the road and making a lot of noise?
>protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most
So
(1) The duration of a protest and
(2) How much inconvenience it causes to the locals
are the two factors that determine whether it's a legitimate protest or not ?
Noise is 100% absolutely definitely harassment, especially when it is over 100dB within people's homes, and every hour of the day for weeks on end. Why do you say it's not? It was loud enough to cause permanent damage and was unending for a significant portion of the occupation, until a citizen managed to get a court injunction.
The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.
You mean they did this at night? Wow. And police let this go on for multiple nights? When sleep deprivation is done to alleged terrorists, Amnesty International calls it torture.
Because it's not, harassment is usually implied to be personal, involving hostile contact between the harasser(s) and the harassed. Did the protestors shout insults or threats at you or other neighborhood residents ?
>all illegal under existing laws
Do we really need to constantly circle back to the point that protests have to be lawful ? they do not, protesting is about breaking the ordinary and disrupting the status quo, that's the point, especially when the people protesting feel cornered and without a lawful retort to perceived injustices.
Every action against the government will hurt the population to some degree or another, 100db noise seems pretty mild compared to the private property damage valued in the millions that large-scale protests usually cause. Prioritising comfort over protest is implicitely siding with the government, which is your right off course, as long as you're explicit about it.
Edit : 100db noise turns out to be a deadly serious matter, I apologize to the person I'm replying to for making light of it.
I still believe it's wrong to use this as justification for quashing a protest, there is a whole spectrum of solutions from reasoning with the protestors to wearing ear covers, but I can better understand and empathize with the antagonism most of the affected city's residents hold toward the protests.
At 100dB, a safe dose is about 15 minutes. Blowing horns all day for weeks on end poses a significant risk of severe hearing loss. Per affected person, a hearing loss payout can be up to around $100k. Given the ~1M people in Ottawa, I would expect the physical damage to persons in the area to exceed the millions of dollars in your "[usual] large-scale protest."
Let's flip it - can your neighbour block the end your driveway and lay on their car horn 24/7 for weeks straight if they say they're protesting the government? Bonus points for harassing you if you walk by
I wouldn't like it, but I also wouldn't call it an illegal protest because I don't like it.
Truth be told I've rarely encountered a protest I liked - they are always annoying (even the ones I agree with are annoying - they block traffic to friends and foes equally).
It comes with the territory, and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.
If the government had stopped at halting the horns, very few people would object, and even then not seriously. A lack of a horn does not prevent a protest.
But that's not what Canada did, is it? They not just remove the protest they froze bank accounts of supporters. That's not democracy. That's a government very very threatened by the protest.
If Canada does not wipe the slate clean and vote away every single politician who was culpable in this, then Canada is not the place it's been advertised to be.
I mean, aside from the noise torture they shut down a city's downtown core for 3 weeks, continually threatened, harassed, and assaulted it's residents, released multiple statements and videos calling for overthrowing and arresting elected leaders (especially women / people of colour), and the municipal police force proved itself incapable of enforcing the law and keeping Canadians safe. Not to mention the other blockades that halted more than $300mil/day in trade.
> So you are saying under Canadian law, if you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads
Every protest in history has “done something illegal” like blocking roads or disrupting access to public spaces, at an absolute minimum. So if you have the right to protest, then you have the right to do those things that would otherwise be illegal within the context of a protest, or you don’t have the right to protest at all.
Right so then let's continue the thought process. You are saying under Canadian laws, if a group of people are protesting, they can break whatever laws they want within the context of the protest and the police can't do anything? And if we look historically within Canada, we will see that this holds true? That the police never shut down any protest without emergency laws being enabled?
I am saying that protest by its nature is supposed to be disruptive on some level, and laws prohibit the type of disruptive behaviour typical of a protest clearly don’t apply _if_ you have a right to protest.
Blocking roads and occupying public spaces are some of the most fundamental features of a protest, so if you have a right to protest, then you certainly have a right to do that within the context of a protest.
If a protestor decides to commit a crime during their protesting, like destroying property, arson, assault… then they should still have full criminal liability for that. Nobody is disagreeing with you on that point. To me it seems you are simply trying to invent some contention out of nothing, in order to fit your view that the entire protest itself is illegal.
I never claimed the entire protest is illegal. I'm just trying to question the notion that in Canada when you protest and despite how disruptive you are, the Canadian police can't touch you or stop you without invoking emergency laws. I haven't seen it in recent history so I wonder why it's the case now.
To be fair, no one is complaining that they protested illegally. The complaint is that the protesters actively targeted unrelated civilians and made life a living hell for them for weeks on end.
I don't think you would say that it would be ok for protesters to physically attack random civilians because "it's a protest and that's their protest strategy". There are obviously limits to the illegal behaviour generally allowed to protests.
Again, people aren't complaining that they protested illegally, they are complaining that the protesters are physically and verbally harassing them beyond every reasonable degree.
The quote you brought out does not say that an illegal protest is the basis for using emergency powers. It says that an illegal occupation is the basis.
We have had many many "illegal" protests where streets have been blocked temporarily and there were no calls to break out the emergency act.
> The police couldn't touch the protest for weeks not because of inaction but because your right to protest is a human right. They required the national emergency to remove our right to protest in order to label the protest illegal.
This is wholly incorrect. The Ottawa Police made a huge error at the beginning of the occupation, allowing the occupiers to entrench themselves in the city. Further disagreements in the police force and municipality extended the situation that all levels of government agreed was illegal from day 1.
This wasn't a protest, it was an illegal occupation.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any references to any specific incidences or examples of a person having their accounts frozen for simply donating to the protest. Can anyone provide a reliable source of this happening? Since it's the whole point of the alarmism in the article it seems an important thing to establish.
This article https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/02/21/convoy-protesters-b... isn't quite a debunking but certainly throws some cold water on this claim. Although it's not really explicitly claimed in the article that this is actually happening, just strongly implied. I wonder if that is intentional.
Exactly, the RCMP has not been guiding the banks to freeze the accounts [0]. RCMP and Banks state accounts for donors will not be frozen [1]. At worst RCMP can advise the banks which makes the decision (source from Federal MP) [2].
The government is also working on a plan where you can appeal your account being frozen.
So the government rushes really hard to give themselves the power to freeze bank accounts, but they don't include a way to appeal your account being frozen until you're not able to use your funds for who knows how long.
Yeah I think this is the real key, basically the emergency powers are all or nothing. They're designed for an absolute emergency, so it's perfectly reasonable to have the ability to freeze accounts and do all sorts of extreme stuff. It's not like the emergency provisions were designed specifically for this process, they're designed for everything from a natural disaster to a long term pattern of terror attacks or act of war.
So the question isn't "Is it reasonable to have the power to do this in this specific case". The question really should be, are the powers actually being exercised in this way. It seems pretty clear that they aren't. So all this outrage about freezing accounts for donating to a political course are outrage over something that doesn't seem to have actually happened.
I've been very anti-cryptocurrency/anti-blockchain for years now. I'm still skeptical of them (possibly more due to their current implementations and the fanboy-ism that surrounds them), but this absolutely convinced me that we need non-custodial financial instruments. (Maybe that isn't crypto/blockchain stuff, who knows. Physical cash is annoying to deal with, though.)
However, the problem is that you still need to convert this "uncontrollable" currency into fiat currency. At the very least, you need to pay your taxes. But if the governments decide that non-custodial currency is illegal, then everything from grocery stores to web hosts won't risk accepting anything but government-approved currency. Sure, we'll have black markets where people can convert things to fiat, but those will be expensive and risky.
So I still don't see blockchain as a savior here. If the government can give themselves the power to freeze people's custodial assets on a whim, they can also make it illegal to deal in bitcoin or whatever. And I'm skeptical that this is the kind of issue that can be boiled down into easy-to-understand bits in order to generate a lot of public support. Blockchain already has an image problem, being full of "bros" and undeserved millionaires/billionaires. Most people are not going to put their political support behind this without a huge shift.
There's no escape as long as the entire world relies on fiat currency. There has been a loud contingent of people pointing this out for decades now. Except in typical fashion, most people need something to actually happen before acting on it. Well, now that something has happened.
Unfortunately, most cryptocurrency supporters have been more focused on increasing the fiat price (so they can cash out to fiat and become rich), than on increasing adoption so that you can spend your crypto directly.
Sadly, as long as this hype fueled bubble remains, I doubt much will change.
I think it is not very important whether blockchain is actually the savior or not. Rather, it presents an alternative option that changes the landscape of the debate.
In terms of the Overton window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window), it moves the idea of decentralized, censure resistant money from "unthinkable" to merely being "radical", or even "sensible". This should cause a similar shift on the other side of the window-- rather than having fully censurable state controlled money as being obvious future policy, we are having a debate about the explicit tradeoffs of that choice. The system we get will probably be somewhere in the middle of this, so the shifting of the window matters a lot.
So the existence of a technology can change the outcome merely by its existence, not by it's explicit adoption.
Emergency powers that suspend fundamental civil liberties without judicial oversight are, in a democracy, only justifiable in times of an existential crisis of the nation. One can hardly see how the trucker protests qualify as such.
You will undoubtedly be told to not believe your lying eyes. You will hear people describing protesters who didn't so much as throw a pebble at police or anyone else called terrorists, white supremacists, insurrectionists, etc. This is a calculated effort to change the meaning of words (again) in service of eliminating the basis of law in the West: individual freedom.
Emergency powers passed by a simple majority is also ridiculous. How come it’s not 2/3 or 3/4. So if you have a majority in parliament feel free to just declare emergencies at your leisure?
Agreed, a simple majority for emergency powers is ridiculous. I'd go with at least a 4/5 threshold myself. More than that, any invocation of emergency powers should force a public confidence vote for every elected official when the (strictly limited & non-extensible) duration of the emergency powers expires, where any incumbent who can't achieve at least a simple majority of support following their handling of the emergency is barred from political office for life. That ought to make them think twice about whether declaring an emergency is really worthwhile.
> One can hardly see how the trucker protests qualify as such
There are multiple facets to the protests.
- Blocking the bridge that was responsible for a sizeable percentage of trade between US and Canada goes far beyond a protest and any government would be well within their right to classify this as an emergency.
- You had US-based, armed, ultra-right wing militia elements who weren't trying to protest at all but rather sow discord. These were the types wanting to overthrow the government. Which meant that police weren't able to control the situation and there were legitimate concerns about it getting out of hand.
Wasn't the ambassador bridge cleared before the emergency was declared?
To your second point.. I've watched mainstream media in Canada and watched livestreams coming out of Ottawa, and have no heard of this _at all_. Is there actual evidence of this?
This sort of stuff just has the same effect that the mandates did in the first place.
Congratulations, now you've made it such that it would be _irresponsible_ for me to not keep a large amount of savings outside of the financial system.
This is the biggest benefit.
This moves the conversation in many ways. Noting who is partipating and who is refusing helps map what services to use. The importance of avoiding exchanges/banks that require identifying information is on the back of everyone's mind.
I live in the downtown area of Ottawa and found the protests to be annoying but respected their right to do so. It's strange seeing the hyperbole that pops up in the news contradicting what you can see with your own eyes outside.
I have to go through police checkpoints to get to my home. I'm dealing with political divisions ripping through my friends and family right now. I'm scared of how this is pushing us to more centralized, unchecked, and unjust power in the hands of government.
Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like that much to require that:
> A person must not participate in a public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace by:
>
> (a) the serious disruption of the movement of persons or goods or the serious interference with trade;
> (b) the interference with the functioning of critical infrastructure; or
> (c) the support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property.
I think it's possible to respect that approach, but still be mad as hell and get your point across.
Not sure what your point is here, though. I agree with you, but the right way to deal with people who violate this is to arrest them, charge them with a crime, and put them on trial. Not freezing their bank accounts without due process or recourse. The latter is undemocratic and authoritarian.
Agreed. I've watched the news this past week. We somehow went from A) allowing most illegal activities to B) completely disallowing any form of actual protest.
(EDIT: according to rescripting, there are protests still happening in Ottawa. See thread [0])
They are clearing the entire city. Anybody who doesn't work or live in Ottawa is not allowed to be there - you get arrested for being there. The new Ottawa police chief said something to the effect of "We are doing everything we can to ensure there are no more protests happening in Ottawa."
Another reason to have decentralisation in financial system. I'm not for cryptocurrency but this excess in democratic state is exactly what brings people to alternatives, ie Bitcoin.
By the 2020’s western state power is no longer exercised through employment of a physical law enforcement corps. The middle class is sufficiently controlled by a centralized financial structure, but the social protection capacity of the state has become overwhelmed by both the numbers of the underclass and the wealth of the overclass. This is often presented as an intentional political position, but it should be easy to see that this was just a pragmatic alignment with the inevitable reality. A pandemic pushes the state into a position to assert absolute power, and a series of protests arise to test that power, while investors enter a mania for alternative financial systems. The differences in response to the various threats to state power raise the ultimate question of this learning unit: Is there such a thing as a power based on and constrained by the consent of the governed, or is a government only legitimized by its ability to exert and retain power in the form of control over the governed?
There are communities that live without access to the banking system already. Many of them do so from a philosophy of independence (in the old sense, they wish to limit their reliance on things outside their community).
Certainly some of their methods will be of great interest to the unpersons, perhaps some of the philosophy will be more appealing too.
I can only assume that adopting this form of finance would involve a huge change in lifestyle for most people. Those changes should be adopted by choice, not because a government has capriciously pulled the rug out from under you.
The same exact thing happened after 15 July 2016 (Erdogan staged a coup attempt on his own) in Turkey. To put it simply it was the beginning of the genocide of peaceful Gulen movement members or anyone who had any kind of connection with them in the past.
The bank that I had account + credit card was shut down (stolen by Turkish state) with the decree laws. My brother had an additional account in another bank. That bank terminated his account and credit card using decree laws as a reason, no court order.
We lost our jobs, money and freedom in a single night. Our company was shut down by the state without due process. My relatives, friends and colleagues got jailed and tortured by Turkish police and soldiers. We got fired and almost none of us were able to get employment (we got work permits revoked) code 36 (fired due to decree laws) is on social insurance records. University degrees of some of us cancelled by the decree law. There are thousands of things I want to tell but it is too long. At the end my brother became a permanent resident in Canada via asylum and I am an asylum seeker in Greece (decisions take way long here). My relatives and friends still in jail in Turkey.
To put it simply, what Canadian government is planning right now is a clear way to go for genocide. Killing people economically is a part of genocide method (don't ask me where I know it).
Lol give me a break. This was a handful of people directly involved in the protests occupying Ottawa for three weeks who had their accounts frozen. Comparing the governments of Canada and Turkey is just absurd.
Yep, close to 100,000 arrested, 500,000 investigated, 150,000 public servant dismissed, 319 journalists arrested in Turkey [1]. What is happening in Turkey is very different than Canada.
Why downvote? Everything he said is true except that Erdogan staged the coup attempt. He probably know about it much earlier and did not intervene, but it is too much to claim he staged it. Regardless, lots of people had their assets seized or frozen by government or people close to it without due process.
Also equating what is happening in Turkey or Canada to Genocide is a bit too much :)
Your comment is really interesting but it is probably getting downvoted because of the last paragraph. Accusing the Canadian government of planning genocide is way over the top.
Given that modern technology enables silencing political opposition without necessarily murdering them, some might argue that we'll see fewer murders in the future.
But China is a good counter-argument to that assertion. It's very technologically advanced, yet its totalitarian regime is continuing to commit atrocities (murders, work camps, prison sentences without due process, etc.) against Uyghurs.
My wife just asked me: haven't the truckers now basically been proven right?
I mean: in the end what they were really protesting against were measures they did find totalitarian (btw I'm double vaccinated and so is my wife, out of our free will, so we're not anti-vaxx).
The measures taken do not look like something normal to do in a democracy: invoking an emergency act and using laws meant for war times... Aren't some people who were not sympathetic to their cause now going to think they were right all along?
I'm asking because I just explained the situation to my wife and her first reaction was precisely what I mentioned: "so they were right all along?"
I didn't look at it from that angle but there are obviously people who will.
Is it a slightly different twist on the question of whether a tolerant society tolerate the intolerant? It seems to me like the protestors were already treated very liberally and their continued escalation and radicalization led to stronger response. On a smaller scale, you cannot sit on your neighbour's doorstep screaming they hate you and when you get evicted, claim you were right all along.
The way you deal with that is by arresting them and charging them with specific crimes.
You do not just get to seize all of their assets without due process.
The protest was already cleared away using conventional policing methods yet this law still remains on the books and they are going after protestors retroactively. It is vindictive and despotic.
See https://lois-laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-24.501/
this is covered by existing laws.
Proceeds involved in crime. ()
If it can be proven that those fund were not involved in criminal activity, the courts will unfreeze. (or at least that's how it's intended to function).
() that's up to courts, not public opinion. I'm in the public.
No they have to hold a trial - after the act ends. (the precise details are way above my level of understanding). But everyone gets held on trial - including government. (I have no idea what that means as yet)
As to organised crime, there's strong accusation of exactly that involved here. But I suppose it'll sort in the trials of the leaders.
its hard to fathom the case being made by canada's government that the 100,000 people who donated are accomplices to a crime. statistically, they would otherwise have to be average law abiding citizens. there was no violence in ottawa, no deaths; certainly nothing remotely worthy of invoking the emergency act; you can watch for yourself, if you can find feeds that werent deleted, many of the 170 arrests. they were mass arrests. i believe the most severe charge facing the organizer is conspiracy to commit... mischief. further, i have never witnessed such blatant, shameless propaganda combined with censorship in a western country. are there academic theories about why this is happening that don't veer into tinfoil hat territory?
Literally watched videos of violence. People throwing hands, and that’s on top of the honking reaching hearing level damage inside peoples homes. I don’t know about you but when someone does something that damages my body for weeks on end, I consider that violence
Anyone reading this should realize that these "protests" have been completely beyond what's reasonable. They're fighting against sensible measures made to protect the population, and have made absolute idiots of themselves.
They don't have any respect from the average Canadian. They are an incredibly disruptive, sometimes violent group, with no respect for basic human decency. I know people who were forced out of their homes because you go crazy after that much continuous honking.
I don't have the slightest shred of pity for anyone involved in these "protests", or anyone who supported them. It's a disgrace that strong action wasn't taken more quickly.
Pardon my ignorance, absent any guise of protest, can people be paid to block bridges and roads? Is there any other legal mechanism to combat organized disruption?
Wow the libertarian tech bros are really coming out in force on this one.
Unlike in the US, most Canadians are okay with trading some small freedoms for the greater good.
As a Canadian I have no problem with these power being used in this extreme case. After three weeks of occupying downtown Ottawa with the demand that the government be dismantled, they are no longer peaceful protesters. They are a group trying to remove a democratically elected western government. It makes perfect sense that funding for a group like that (a terrorist group) would be blocked.
I am glad that unlike the US, Canada is not allowing the far right to operate unimpeded. Homegrown right wing extremism is a growing problem in the US and is spilling over into Canada (Thanks Facebook) and I’m happy to see it being put down in this small way.
Well, as I said before — another day, another answer to "What is Bitcoin good for?"
This time the answer is "It's useful to make your mortgage payment when one of your family members donates to a trucker protest that successfully applies pressure to the Canadian government, which then 'freezes' your bank account until the emergency legislation expires."
The quoted tweets point out that legal pornographers and legal gun shops have been subjected to similar, but less transparent, measures.
Of course the law says it applies equally to cryptocurrencies, but it really only applies to intermediaries. The point of cryptocurrencies is that they make you independent of intermediaries; you can possess your own coins instead of lending them to a bank or a stockbroker. This is part of what the Nunchuk response quoted explains.
I'm also concerned about the long term implications of using the Emergencies Act, particularly in the future when we have a majority parliament where attaching confidence wouldn't be as much of a mitigation. I'm okay with the use of it in this scenario since it's possible to connect the sources of money from foreign actors and some of the activities connected with the protests, particularly when the government committed to follow on with legislation that would serve the same function as what they're using in the act.
One comment about the article tho: Quoting Ezra Lavant immediately destroys the credibility of the author due to his obvious and direct connection to misinformation and over all general grift by attaching himself to right wing causes. There are lots of strong credible sources that could back up the argument of government overreach with the EA, but Ezra is not one of them.
This all madness started when Canadian government couldn't admit that with omicron vaccine mandates no longer make much sense. Even if they played some role previously, previous infection is functionally equivalent to vaccination. Most provinces had already implemented the plan to revoke them and many other countries are dropping them as well.
This proves again and again that when the government implements a policy that is not based on science, the outcomes are very very bad.
> This all madness started when Canadian government couldn't admit that with omicron vaccine mandates no longer make much sense.
At the time this convoy began, Ontario was experiencing a surge in its hospitals with around 4000 hospital beds occupied by people with COVID.[1][2] Note, that's from COVID, not with COVID.
While it may turn out to be true that Omicron made mandates make no sense, keep in mind these rules were in response to the US' implementation, announced in October of last year.[3] Canada implemented these to sync up and provide clarity at the borders in January, when then American rules went into effect.[4]
> 1) About half of those people in hospitals were vaccinated.
Considering Ontario is 90% 12+ fully vaccinated and 85% 5+ fully vaccinated[1], this means somewhere in the neighbourhood of say 15-18% of the population represents 50% of our hospitalizations, likely a lower percentage, since as you note this tends to hospitalize people in older cohorts.
> 2) Vaccine mandates do not considerably improve vaccination update, especially among elderly who benefit the most from vaccination.
Firstly, Ontario's elderly are massively vaccinated. 80+ is 99.99%, 70-79 is 99.99%, 60-69 (which I wouldn't consider elderly these days) is 97.37%.[4] This isn't due to anything very recent either, the rates have been 90%+ two doses for the 70+ crowd since August of last year.
Secondly, if this were true, you would not expect to see upticks in vaccinations coinciding with mandate implementations. Yet in [1], in November of 2021 you see a clear uptake in vaccination doses administered. This coincides roughly when 5+ were authorized for vaccination[2], as well as when federally regulated industries began requiring it.[3]
You can see from the raw data in [4] first doses between Nov 1 2021 and Jan 1 2022 was 468,443 for 5-11s, 28,257 for 12-17s, and 220,641 for 18+. Nearly a third of all first doses during the time period when 5-11 just became newly able to be vaccinated came from Ontario's adults. There was an 88.5% vaccination rate among 18+ at the start of that time period and there was a noticeable dip in vaccinations due to the holidays (you can see this in the booster #s too). You can question the motivations of those people but I think the numbers at least suggest that the mandates do have a part to play in driving people to get vaccinated.
1) That's true and it shows that the difference between vaccinated and non-vaccinated is not dramatic. If everybody was vaccinated the decrease of hospitalization would be 50% which is not that significant compared to what we have gone through.
2) That's true as well and the UK had no vaccine mandates and had the same vaccination rates for elderly. And many countries with very strict vaccine mandates had terrible rates for elderly vaccinations, for example, in Latvia it is less than 75% while vaccination uptake among younger people is higher than that.
The numbers do not show that the mandates considerably improved vaccination uptake among elderly neither in Canada, nor in other countries. I am questioning the motivation of people who try to push vaccine mandates by intentionally obscuring this point and by mixing true statements and projecting them onto elderly which is not confirmed by data.
> 1) That's true and it shows that the difference between vaccinated and non-vaccinated is not dramatic. If everybody was vaccinated the decrease of hospitalization would be 50% which is not that significant compared to what we have gone through.
What you are suggesting here is that a 50% decrease in hospitalizations (or we could argue even lower, say 35%) is not significant. Do I have that correct? You're essentially saying that 2000 fewer people in hospitals, when capacity is around 7000-10000 (depending on staffing), doesn't matter.
> 2) That's true as well and the UK had no vaccine mandates and had the same vaccination rates for elderly. And many countries with very strict vaccine mandates had terrible rates for elderly vaccinations, for example, in Latvia it is less than 75% while vaccination uptake among younger people is higher than that.
Firstly, the UK is not one amorphous thing. There absolutely were vaccine mandates within the UK.[1][2][3] Just not England (at least in the most recent round).
I would be hesitant to ascribe vaccine mandates as the sole cause for any vaccination uptake regardless. Each community is going to have their own reasons to distrust the medicine and the government. Notably in the US the African American community has probably been given ample reason to distrust it. Similarly, you see poor uptake in countries where trust in the government is low.
Mandates will not fix making every last unvaccinated person change their mind, and I think it's important to understand that that's not actually the goal of them. It's to convince some more of the people. Remember the idea of herd immunity is to hit some requisite percentage of the population that will help protect the people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised.
> The numbers do not show that the mandates considerably improved vaccination uptake among elderly neither in Canada, nor in other countries. I am questioning the motivation of people who try to push vaccine mandates by intentionally obscuring this point and by mixing true statements and projecting them onto elderly which is not confirmed by data.
I never claimed it increased vaccination rates among the elderly. As I directly mentioned, the elderly in Ontario were already highly vaccinated. It couldn't have massively increased vaccination rates among the elderly because by the time they were implemented the elderly were already mostly vaccinated. You have created an argument to rail against where there was none.
Let's flip this around: Why are the elderly the only group you're suggesting we care about protecting?
1) It matter but not that much. There are 92000 physicians in Canada. Of course, most of them are involved in many other healthcare activities. In general, hospitals have 1 physician for 10 patients which means that only 200 more physicians are required during this time. Probably vaccine mandates have prevented more than that number to even work. Staff availability was one of the reasons why the UK decided to revoke vaccine mandates even for healthcare staff.
2) “Trust in government” is something that is thrown around but mostly it is speculation. It was said that Sweden didn't need mandatory lockdowns because Swedes trust in the government but people in the UK do not. And yet, with vaccinations both countries have done well without vaccine mandates. Is Canada really so much different from the UK? I really doubt it. It is probably more similar to the UK than to the USA.
My original argument was that vaccination uptake by elderly is that matters the most. And data clearly shows that it is true. For example, Israel despite strict vaccine mandates have poor vaccination uptake by elderly. It could be even argued that vaccine mandates may decrease vaccination uptake by elderly. As you say, Canada introduced vaccine mandates when majority of elderly where already vaccinated so that there was no noticiable slowdown in this group but other countries may have even made this worse by pointless vaccine mandates.
> 1) It matter but not that much. There are 92000 physicians in Canada. Of course, most of them are involved in many other healthcare activities. In general, hospitals have 1 physician for 10 patients which means that only 200 more physicians are required during this time. Probably vaccine mandates have prevented more than that number to even work. Staff availability was one of the reasons why the UK decided to revoke vaccine mandates even for healthcare staff.
Most of this is guesswork. Please provide evidence to back up any of these claims.
> 2) “Trust in government” is something that is thrown around but mostly it is speculation. It was said that Sweden didn't need mandatory lockdowns because Swedes trust in the government but people in the UK do not. And yet, with vaccinations both countries have done well without vaccine mandates. Is Canada really so much different from the UK? I really doubt it. It is probably more similar to the UK than to the USA.
Again, portions of the UK did have vaccine mandates, just not the most populous part. "Done well" is also a difficult pill to swallow given that the UK as a whole saw COVID-19 death rates of 2,359/1M people, Sweden had rates of 1,666/1M people, while Canada has had a rate of 948/1M people. The UK and Sweden also both lag behind Canada in terms of vaccination, at 85%/81% in Canada vs 77%/72% the UK and 77%/75% for Sweden,[2] despite the UK starting their vaccination efforts before every other country.
> My original argument was that vaccination uptake by elderly is that matters the most. And data clearly shows that it is true. For example, Israel despite strict vaccine mandates have poor vaccination uptake by elderly. It could be even argued that vaccine mandates may decrease vaccination uptake by elderly. As you say, Canada introduced vaccine mandates when majority of elderly where already vaccinated so that there was no noticiable slowdown in this group but other countries may have even made this worse by pointless vaccine mandates.
I'm not sure how making proof of vaccination a requirement to do things is going to prevent people from getting vaccinated.
Also, you appear to be completely wrong about Israel, as according to [3] the 60+ crowd are driving the bulk of their vaccinations at 80% with two doses.
If you're going to continue to debate this, please at least research the things you're going to respond with.
1) The reference is the UK health ministry report why they revoked the vaccine mandates for healthcare professionals.
2) With the global perspective the differences are not significant. Most important what are vaccination rates among elderly? You correctly show that in Israel it is barely 90% and somehow the graph doesn't show it but it has remained something like that for over the year. While in the UK (and Canada) it is close 99.9%. See the difference?
>> Remember the idea of herd immunity is to hit some requisite percentage of the population that will help protect the people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised.
I remember that idea and unfortunately it is not possible to reach herd immunity with vaccines that do not protect from infection. You need to update the current scientific knowledge. That's why I am saying that vaccine mandates are anti-scientific because they ignore hard scientific facts and are based on la-la land ideas.
> I remember that idea and unfortunately it is not possible to reach herd immunity with vaccines that do not protect from infection. You need to update the current scientific knowledge. That's why I am saying that vaccine mandates are anti-scientific because they ignore hard scientific facts and are based on la-la land ideas.
Please provide any kind of source or citation for this claim, rather than simply dropping "you need to update the current scientific knowledge" as though what you are stating as fact.
I am really surprised that you are asking about this as if this is something that still needs to be proved. Read the UN materials on this issue. They are very informative.
Basically this is something you have to research yourself because the number of scientific articles are so numerous that I don't even know where to start. When omicron came it became obvious that most people – vaccinated or not – will get it. Vaccines are only protecting people by reducing disease severity and deaths (about 90% protection).
Nevertheless, many politicians haven't updated their knowledge therefore insists on stupid mandates.
I'd like to be wrong, as I'm asserting this based on the logic of a known playbook for these kind of things. If I am not wrong, it would be evidence they are using that playbook with some implied ends in mind.
The provisions expire ostensibly in 30 days, but what's pretty clear is there are exceptions for certain protests, and what I forsee occuring is there will be provocative so-called "counter protests," backed by the governing parties, which will result in "random" violence (some staged, some provoked), that will be used as a further pretext to extend and augment the powers into an indefinite emergency. (remind me: April 15, 2022) The playbook is a mix of colour revolution tactics with Arendt's description of totalitarian movements using absurdity and chaos via other movements to neutralize people at large.
In case you were still catching up, it would now seem uncontroversial that the Emergencies Act is at least how far they are willing to go to implement digital identity via vaccine passports. Simply, the Canadian government has metastasized. I'm not neutral at all, but I like to constantly reassess whether my views have predictive power.
The outs I see are:
a) tension fizzles and cools off, vaccine passports get pulled as promised in 2 weeks, act expires in 30 days, life goes back to mostly normal, pandemic finished like it is in dozens of other countries around the world.
b) narrative changes and now that truckers are moved, no reason to pull back vaccine passports anymore, and some excuse is contrived to maintain them - permanently divided society results.
c) government becomes histrionic and starts escalating reaction to imaginary threats, adds additional powers, starts purging society groups from financial system and employment - result is decade+ of strife.
d) government just says fuck it, Queen dies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and potentially France form a new post-national bloc with only nominal local rule, similar to the EU, but mainly operated by a transnational committee that implements a social credit system to engineer a utopian experiment that accepts a lot of casulties.
These are coarse grained scenarios, but as poles for likely outcomes, they're the waypoints I'm using. Most people think option a) is plausible, but I think their hope obscures their ability to see incentives. Option b) is a verifiable bet in a couple of weeks, and if b, then it's a quesiton of whether it's in service of c) or d).
mid-march, passports no longer required for restaurants, life going back to normal. there are still powers and mandates, and businesses have "discretion," to require them, but for posterity, the catastrophic options in my comment above were just that.
IIRC, Trump offered to send in help, but his offers were declined. Any law enforcement failures back then should rightfully be placed on local and state authorities.
> 2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
I don't know where the pollsters find these respondents, but judging by the comments of any article that still allows them it's not the majority of politically engaged canadians. Not that the majority being okay with it would make it all right under the charter.
Democracy doesn't have to be 51% majority rule. That would be quite unfair to the loosing minority. Consensus democracy is one alternative, preventing a majority from imposing on a minority. There's things like super majorities, also. Not just winner-take-all majority voting.
Switzerland is a great example of a more direct democracy. Local canton governments control taxes, health care, etc. The people can petition for a referendum vote to overrule the politicians, adding or deleting laws. It's been working well for a while.
Slippery Slope fallacy is one of those expressions that gets thrown around a lot when people want to believe the next logical step forward won’t happen. When it constantly happens over and over again, it’s no longer a fallacy…just the next logical step.
Slippery slope is only a fallacy when you have very limited, often a single, data point. You could say using the Emergencies Act is only a single data point or you could say giving in to the authoritarian nature of power hungry politicians has endless data points. If one sees the Emergencies Act as a subset of power hungry politicians, there are already more than enough data points to see where the slope leads. Even before the pandemic there were already plenty of data points to establish that PM Trudeau and his cabinet are power hungry authoritarians. It pretty much comes with the position.
> "A slippery slope argument (SSA), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is an argument in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect"
> In a slippery slope argument, a course of action is rejected because, with little or no evidence, one insists that it will lead to a chain reaction resulting in an undesirable end or ends. The slippery slope involves an acceptance of a succession of events without direct evidence that this course of events will happen.
> The two primary forms of the slippery slope argument are the logical form, (in which acceptance of A must logically lead to acceptance of the undesirable B), and the psychological form, in which it is argued that the acceptance of A will, over time, lead people to be more willing to accept B.
Also: general hand-waving like "based on this government's track record" does not a pattern make. Like most of my cited sources say: "based on little or no supporting evidence."
The slippery slope argument requires a slope. In your opinion what the parent comment said is a radical departure from what's currently happening.
Personally, I don't think that a government which stamps out protest and bank accounts of political rivals is anywhere but at the bottom of the slope. I've lived in Africa and I've seen how this goes.
There's nothing slippery slope-y about a political party freezing the bank accounts of the opponents that are protesting against its policies in the streets. Had this been happening in the countries we (meaning the West) don't like the press would have been up in arms about it, for obvious reasons.
The obvious reason being that the government in question is democratically elected and the ones that (probably) fall into “countries we don’t like” aren’t democratically elected?
Doesn't matter, all that matters is are they on "your side" or not. Had the USA froze assets of BLM and BLM-associated groups during 2020 the "democratically elected" wouldn't have stopped people complaining.
What’s there to explain? Are you under the impression that all protests are of equivalent legitimacy no matter what tactics they use, what their demands are, and what their non-protest alternatives are?
Yes, in the sense that all protests should be held to the same standard by the government regardless of legimatcy. As in you can absolutely be against a portest that you don't agree with and deem illegitimate. But, the government does not get to decide what cause is "legitimate" to forbid a group from doing what they encouraged another group to do. The point of protesting is to protest against those in power, not to show how much you agree with them
> The obvious reason being that the government in question is democratically elected and the ones that (probably) fall into “countries we don’t like” aren’t democratically elected?
I mean India is the world's largest democracy, so clearly that's not the obvious reason.
> Are you under the impression that all protests are of equivalent legitimacy no matter what tactics they use, what their demands are, and what their non-protest alternatives are?
That doesn't justify freezing a person's bank account.
I think it's fine to post personal opinions here, even speculation. I felt like this one was cynical, but not without precedent. Posting links to actions other governments have taken in the past would be nice, but it wouldn't prove the same thing would happen this time. So unless the counter-argument is "what you are saying might happen has never happened before, and could not conceivably happen now" then I don't think lack of support is damning either. Readers should take these rants with a healthy dose of salt, and those who won't probably don't care how they are presented anyway.
Sometimes the slope actually is slippery, it's not always a fallacy.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? It recently prevented me from buying a package of decongestants at Walgreens. I guess keeping my nose clogged helped America fight Al Qaeda or something.
I think government overreach is basically the status quo. Or as the old saying goes, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".
That is not at all an example of slippery slope. That’s an example of bills being attached to other bills to increase their odds of getting passed. Different problem with different solutions. Has nothing to do and was never claimed to have anything to do with al Qaeda/terrorism/etc.
I believe that those sunset provisions you were referring to only applied to the surveillance parts of the bill, not the entire PATRIOT Act. Also, they were originally supposed to expire in 2005, so the government kept the power ~3 times longer than the end date of the original bill.
The Patriot Act banned OTC sales of pseudoephedrine. The "Sudafed" you can buy now uses phenylephrine, a drug whose effectiveness as a decongestant is somewhat controversial (quite a few studies have found that it does no better than a placebo)
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and please don't cross into personal attack. All that is directly destructive of what we're trying for on this site.
I don't appreciate the condescending attitude, and I'm well aware of the extensive use of slippery slope fallacies to attack policies or legislation.
It's cheap fear-mongering, getting people to associate an extreme outcome with a much more moderate proposed action.
"If you allow bike lanes in our city, in a few years these bike commies will be trying to spend tax dollars on buying everyone bikes, and then make it illegal to drive your car in the road!"
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Your GP comment was already unsubstantive, which is the main reason why we're getting a flamewar in this subthread, and it's also not cool to feed it as you're doing here. If a parent comment is breaking the site guidelines (which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30432570 was), the thing to do is flag it, not reply by fueling the flames.
Many long term political goals are achieved through incrementalism which others might call the "slippery slope." Incrementalism is a political tactic that is extremely effective. To dismiss it purely as an argumentative fallacy in all cases demonstrates naivety and the person who pointed out that you probably don't understand government was right to do so.
There are probably very few cases where the government implemented a rule or regulation or tax or anything where it was eventually rolled back. The government has a long and documented track record of incrementally expanding its reach and power.
The US homeland security act will never time out. The Canadian emergencies act will likely also continue on forever, but the act doesn't actually have to get worse to BE worse. The act is already dictatorial. The controlling government will just figure out how to apply the emergencies act more liberally against political opponents. That's how it will get worse.
You do realize that this is, in fact, very similar to what the people who stumped for "just letting us have bike lanes" have progressed to advocating, right? Totally car-free roads, roads that technically are car-usable but have been rigged so that they won't support normal traffic, various pushes to force (or "nudge" or "encourage") people to ride bikes or take mass transit instead of driving... etc.
And they even helped with convenient tax credits for taking their preferred modes of transportation! (spending tax dollars)
It seems pretty weird to try to equate an absurd scenario around bikes, to a situation where governments with track records of accumulating and abusing power might... accumulate and abuse more power. Asserting that "this time will be different" feels a bit naive, no?
> "If you allow bike lanes in our city, in a few years these bike commies will be trying to spend tax dollars on buying everyone bikes, and then make it illegal to drive your car in the road!"
strawman fallacy (or "whataboutism" if you prefer (I don't))
I was with you after watching the Maher video, but Dore is operating on false assumptions. Vaccine passports won't "track wherever you go for the rest of your life". Getting vaccinated doesn't "only protect you". Stopped watching after barely 30 seconds.
>I was with you after watching the Maher video, but Dore is operating on false assumptions. Vaccine passports won't "track wherever you go for the rest of your life". Getting vaccinated doesn't "only protect you". Stopped watching after barely 30 seconds.
20 minute video, I'm sure he's going to say stuff. I'll even say that I tend not to agree with him on many things. He's a bernie bro and I'm certainly not.
But the point I was making, the shit going down in Canada is real and hard pill to swallow.
If you wish to ignore jimmy dore, fine. Did you read the article?
How do we know any of these people committed a serious crime? They were not charged with anything or put on trial. A judge/jury has not (yet) found any of these people guilty of anything.
Seizing money absolutely violates human rights when it's done without due process, as was the case here.
Is it common? My understanding is that freezing bank accounts is generally limited to things like financial crimes or drug dealing, where the account might contain money that you obtained unlawfully in the first place. Do people arrested for, say, murder usually have their bank accounts frozen?
Your bank will freeze your account if they detect suspicious activity. Your credit card agreement likely has a provision to allow them to freeze your bank account for non-payment.
The underlying question is whether or not a financial crime is actually happening. The idea of a decentralized protest having some random "leaders" in-trusted with donations is in need of scrutiny. It doesn't matter if it's this or BLM. Where is this money coming from and who is it going to?
Which authorities specifically say that this is the underlying question? When Trudeau announced the policy, he said it was about "keeping Canadians safe, protecting people's jobs" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385) - it doesn't really sound to me like his goal was to protect protest donors from potential fraud.
The TD bank had already requested prior to the act some direction on what to do with the funds "“We are unable to release the funds without the court’s direction because multiple parties, including the account holder, intended recipients and some donors, may be entitled to the funds,” a TD spokesperson said."
“The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the proceeds of crime and terrorist financing act,” said Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.
there's a push both in Canada and here in the US to label these political undesirables as "domestic terrorists" as justification, because it makes sense to freeze the bank accounts of domestic terrorists. this is why they're trying to make a direct connection between the "January 6th Insurrection" and this incident, to portray both as connected instances of far-right-wing domestic terror/insurrectionism.
At least some of the protestors have profited from their protests ie. we know that money has been flowing in courtesy of sites like GoFundMe.
So there is a case that some of those protestors should have profits seized if they committed a crime (not claiming they did). The question is whether ordinary protestors will have the same process applied to them.
Is the government that is being advocated for by the protesters more authoritarian than the one that currently in place even with expansion of powers, is this a move to "adopting the methods of the CCP" or is this "realizing that the current tolerance promoted is not able to cope with philosophies espoused by the protesters"?
My take on this is much of this is based on some form of accelerationism and a "burn it down and we'll build it again." And given the views of the people promoting this, I tend to doubt that they'll make something better afterwards either.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style and especially please not use HN primarily for political or ideological battle? All those things destroy what HN is supposed to be for. We want curious conversation here.
I'm seeing a lot of terrible takes by Americans, and a lot of Canadians shaking their heads. It seems theres a lot of disinformation crossing the border.
* Quoting Ezra Levant is just... hilarious. His news rag has been banned from so many press events.
* We JUST had a federal election where these protesters could have made their point. Instead they chose to strangle the capitol and borders across the country.
* Over a thousand donors to the Convoy have been linked to the Jan 6th capitol demonstration and attack.
* 3 weeks of disruption to the nation's capital with horns blaring overnight, arson attempts, and weapons seizures is not "non-violent". There is not much difference between storming a capital and strangling one. Police and Military members were involved in creating supply lines and creating an occupation. And there were plans to block airport cargo terminals. The economic impacts across the nation are in the billions of dollars.
* The freezing of finances IS NOT retroactive, thanks to our charter, meaning if you donated to the convoy before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, you won't be targeted. The only accounts were “individuals and companies suspected of involvement in illegal acts,” such as “influencers in the illegal protest in Ottawa” and vehicle owners and drivers “who did not want to leave the area impacted by the protest.”
* It's hard to see the act as a tyrannical overreach if it can be challenged in court and has a public inquiry
* Police didn't enforce the law which is why the feds needed to intervene. The public inquiry (required by the act) should reveal why police forces were unable to shut down these protests earlier, and where the money was flowing. If donor lists are to be believed, there was a significant amount of foreign funding into this operation, as well as members of the public service.
I still don't get how this is all ok. The way to break up illegal behavior is to arrest those responsible, and then charge them and try them for crimes. Which in this case, should have been trivially easy, since the participants of main importance were there, in public, sitting in their trucks.
Governments should not have tools so readily available that allow them to destroy a person's (or family's) finances without due process.
> Police didn't enforce the law which is why the feds needed to intervene.
That seems to be a pretty big problem. If the police aren't doing their job, fire their leadership and find people who will get it done. Does Canada have something analogous to the US National Guard that could have been brought in to deal with this if the local authorities were refusing to take action?
The outrage here -- at least to me -- isn't about how many people were affected by this or about how the truckers could have better made their point. It's that governments just should not have the power to "solve" problems like this in this way. (And before anyone decides to jump into whataboutism territory, yes, I acknowledge that the US has similar problems, and we suck as well for letting authorities get away with it.)
> I still don't get how this is all ok. The way to break up illegal behavior is to arrest those responsible, and then charge them and try them for crimes. Which in this case, should have been trivially easy, since the participants of main importance were there, in public, sitting in their trucks.
They did this, once they had the additional support they needed.
> That seems to be a pretty big problem. If the police aren't doing their job, fire their leadership and find people who will get it done. Does Canada have something analogous to the US National Guard that could have been brought in to deal with this if the local authorities were refusing to take action?
Not really anything specifically the same as the National Guard in terms of policing actions. The closest you could argue is the RCMP.
The city did eventually fire the police chief, get extra resources, and make arrests, as I'm sure if you've followed this story at all you'll have seen by now.
> The outrage here -- at least to me -- isn't about how many people were affected by this or about how the truckers could have better made their point. It's that governments just should not have the power to "solve" problems like this in this way. (And before anyone decides to jump into whataboutism territory, yes, I acknowledge that the US has similar problems, and we suck as well for letting authorities get away with it.)
I agree with you here. It should not have gotten to this point. Where do you draw the line though?
At what point is a person's right to protest crossing a line?
Is it blocking off roadways for several weeks?
Is it shutting down businesses in a downtown core?
Is it harassing people?
Is it threatening people?
Is it assaulting people?
Is it attempted arson?
I'm trying to envision where the line should be drawn in a way that respects right to protest and allows the locals to not have to endure the above.
At what point do you cut off their funding source(s)?
The failure on the convoy organizer's part was placing the trucks where they did and deciding to harass the people who just live in downtown Ottawa. If they were up on Parliament hill for these three weeks and there weren't collections of stories of the above, nobody would really care.[1] As I've mentioned elsewhere, Ottawa is familiar with large protests and marches. The people calling it an occupation aren't wrong, from the video I've seen and the stories I've heard from friends and family living down there.
1. with a sample size in the hundreds of thousands, even if its true, it's irrelevant.
2. the state of emergency could not be in response to the border closures, because they were cleared prior. one single cachet of weapons was found. per 100,000 criminals, gee, thats better than my hood. as for honking, it should be punishable by death or bankruptcy in any civilized country.
3. yes it is. override of the charter is precisely the power the emergency act seeks
4. have you ever donated to the world wildlife fund? sponsored a child in africa? the data has already made it clear that the majority of funding came from within canada in small amounts. occams razor: this is the result of frustrated citizens, not vladimir putin
1. Canada's terrorism financing and anti-money laundering laws are very clear and very strict. The fact that they chose platforms that are not reporting to FINTRAC is suspect, and the leaked donor lists show roughly half of all donations were foreign.
2. The weapons themselves were not the problem. Gas canisters stockpiled unsafely near parliament is a huge concern. And weapons found in Coutts were directly linked to a credible threat of an attack on RCMP members (high-capacity magazines are extremely illegal).
3. The Emergencies Act is subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is written into the Act itself. The Charter, which continues to be supreme to the Emergency Act, forbids retroactive punishment.
4. See above. This is not a charity or nonprofit. It is a criminal organization that is under investigation.
3. of course the constitution (of which the charter is part) is the supreme law of canada. but, the rights and freedoms within the charter are not absolute; they can and have been been limited, as could be no more obvious than the clearing of the protest itself (the right to freedom of assembly)
That includes not posting flamewar comments, not calling names, not crossing into personal attack, not being snarky, and not using the thread for political or ideological battle. You can make your substantive points without any of that, and we want curious conversation here.