Patio11 has some good coverage of Trudeau's handling of the trucker protest against the government's handling of COVID-19 [1].
Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:
"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."
I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
And the court of law later determined that this was an abuse of power and unlawful. The fact that there is an existing law that can be abused does not negate the argument that abusing it is unlawful.
On April 25, 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau selected Rouleau to be the commissioner of the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which had occurred in response to the 2022 Canada convoy protest.
That's the bigger picture problem with Canada (and nearly every place else). Our laws assume the government is the good guy, when they should be assuming the government is public enemy number one.
The problem is seeing government as anything but people. Living in euphemistic identity. It’s the corniest of Middle Ages roleplay; man named Farmer is a farmer for life. Someone who labels themselves an accountant must be one for life!
We should vote ranked choice style for economic “tent poles”. Healthcare and infrastructure, on down the list of shared concerns.
That won’t happen though because the innumerate masses will be reminded that if Elon Musk and co don’t get special tax concessions a giant foot will come down from the sky and step on us all.
Had Union grocery workers demand to see my prescription papers please before they’d let me continue on to the pharmacy in the grocery that operated via a different contract and was still open. I said they had to a count of 5 and then I’d drive into them. Trump and/or some random dipshit from an adjacent zip code is the enemy.
iirc the finding was that it was within the power of the province to handle the situation.
The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"
I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.
The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.
It may have been an emergency in the first days with the honking. That largely stopped after a week or so.
They switched to camping in front of the parliament with bouncy castles etc.
The bridge that was occupied in another province was cleared.
I'm really not under the impression that at the time they went in there was any emergency. It was ugly: Peaceful unarmed protesters in pedestrian zones with no trucks in sight were pushed back by squads with assault rifles and loud tear gas grenades. People with assault rifles stormed delivery vans.
The narrative at the time was that of a huge "far right" (what a surprise ...) conspiracy. No proof has ever emerged, it was just an abuse of power of the "left" who were at the peak of their power back then.
I see a lot of posts like this, and this is straight up disinformation. I'm not assuming it's willful, since disinformation breeds disinformation, but here's my account as someone who lives here and is glad Trudeau resigned.
The idea that it was a few days of honking then bouncy castles is nonsense. It was an extended occupation of the downtown of the capital. Endless trucks and other vehicles, many with their wheels removed, back-to-back fully blocking a large section of the downtown for weeks. Yes, honking – and loud truck air horns.
There really was chaos downtown, and not the hand-wringing "poop in the street in SF" type. And a lot of it did have right wing vibes. Examples: A well known café had its large window with a LGBTQ illustration smashed. There was while when emergency workers needed escort downtown because of racist abuse. (I was downtown, I heard and saw a ton myself.) Just incredibly dumb stuff: A soup kitchen was intimidated and raided.
And yes, it was financially supported by the "right", including a lot of American money.
Yes, there was a site with bouncy castles and kids playing, but that's obviously not a problem. There's protest in Ottawa all the time, and it's sometimes inconvenient, and that's life in the capital.
The last straw for me wasn't even the chaos in Ottawa, but the protest shutting down the Ambassador bridge in Windsor. That's really bad. Ontario's auto sector is huge, and the perceived reliability and predictability of the flow of intermediate goods across the border is everything to that sector. Interrupting it has an enormous immediate and ongoing economic impact. (I'm not sure where you get your information, but the bridge is also in Ontario.)
None of that is to say that the emergencies act was the right tool. My fairly uninformed impression is that there were tools short of the act that should have been used.
But it's frustrating seeing disinformation and revisioning like this stand. Please reconsider whatever news sources are providing you with this false information.
I really don't. I wasn't in support of vaccine mandates and passports, and agreed with some of the truckers demands because in a democracy the bar for protecting personal autonomy and freedom should be incredibly high.
But I also think it's not an unreasonable point to disagree on. There are cases where we curtail freedom for emergencies. That's just a fact. That doesn't mean believing in authoritarianism. And, especially early in the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about how apocalyptic it was going to be.
Flip side, since the mass vaccination has been incredibly valuable, policies that undermine public trust in vaccination hurt us as a society down the line and the bar should be particularly high for them! It's often said the most valuable tool for epidemiology is public trust.
The whole thing was idiotic. There was already a public discussion about when the vaccine mandate for truck drivers was going to be removed. There was plenty of of ground for more useful discussion.
So, to answer your question:
> So you support abusive authoritarianism
Great question, but no I do not. I think the government overreacted (too coercively). The freedom convoy, however was a real problem that needed ending. If that sounds like abusive authoritarianism to you, I'd invite you to share your opinion about traffic signs, prohibitions against cannibalism, and publicly funded hospitals.
Why does everyone have to suffer at the hands of a few?
Overwhelmingly Canadian's wanted the vehicles removed - I recall no public empathy. If not, there would have been overwhelming public outcry and a follow up larger movement protest that would have called for no-confidence motion in that moment.
> flip the sides, i.e. you've a conservative government and a liberal protesting organization, and I'll wait to see your reaction.
You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
Was also fine with the 'Occupy Toronto' folks losing their court case: 2011 ONSC 6862.
And as it stands, I live in Toronto, Canada, which does have a conservative government in the province who is doing all sorts of stupid things:
What do either of the given examples given have to do with the Emergencies Act of freezing someone out of banking? Being kicked off university property is not the same thing as having your financial life frozen by the feds.
> You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
How many of the UofT protestors were de-banked? There's a vast difference between having tents removed from a public space, and being cut off from essential parts of modern life. You can't pay insurance with cash. You can't have a regular phone contract. You may not even be able to have home internet. Someone who is debanked effectively becomes a different caste of person, one who is prohibited from most institutions and services.
You're comparing apples to oranges by comparing the treatment of the trucker protests and the campus occupiers.
Yes, and I live in the same city as well, and I'll agree with you that both Conservatives and Liberals have made things worse for us at different levels of the government.
Do you mean debanking by the government, or for any reasons?
(Because banks will already algorithmically drop you as a customer without explanation or recourse, akin to how you can get your Google account algorithimically banned. TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.)
> TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.
Congratulations, you're in an extremely privileged segment of society. Most of those truckers would likely find it easier to relate to a little green Martian in a flying saucer than to you.
There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.
Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions).
Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst.
And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.
There are literally billions of other problems in society beyond “reducing covid transmission”. Lockdowns forced a myopic focus on exactly one problem to the exclusion of virtually all other problems.
Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.
Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.
Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?
Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?
What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it.
And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.
I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.
Nope. It would have been much easier to “fall in line” and “take covid serious” than to dare tread into non-dogmatic thinking like I did. Then I wouldn’t have pissed off my friends and family. Then I’d still have a good career and good network. My life would have been very much easier to fall in line like the good little west coast liberal caste I was set into.
But you know what? Fuck those people. They are wrong. And so are you. None of our response to Covid made any sense at all. The math never made sense. And it never will. All your “science” and “data” amount to nothing but a pile of appeals to authority. And even then it was the layer of tribal politics that really sealed in the multi-year mass hysteria.
Pull your head out of your ass and it’s clear as day. None of it adds up. Sorry. You are quite simply, wrong. Wake up dude. You got tricked. You are wrong.
By the time most people in Canada got COVID, they were already vaccinated. That was the whole point of limiting transmission. The let it rippers were saying that the old people should just stay in their retirement homes, not understanding that most people at high risk live with others who are working or are working themselves.
I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something.
I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
> I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit.
This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid.
Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
Blocking traffic is still blocking traffic, though. In Canada, the "notwithstanding clause" essentially means no rights are absolute. Intentionally blocking traffic on highways here is generally illegal, insofar as people have a lawful right to drive there normally; see e.g. https://mtplaw.com/legal-news/arrests-for-blocking-a-highway... - and generally there will be clear evidence that such blockages are intentional.
A good parallel is the U.S. campus protests in opposition to military aid for Israel's Gaza campaign, which were violently dispersed. You can find lots of instances of mostly right wingers saying they should never be able to get a job again and such.
That was Bill Ackman. There were also right wingers like Candace Owens who took a stand against it. It’s inaccurate to say that every person on the right was agreeing with that statement.
I think it’s worth noting that the weekend before this, local residents of Ottawa had basically “stormed” one of the trucker convoy camps to unblock a road. There were genuine concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath. Not to mention the blockade in Alberta where they were found with guns and a pipe bomb, with their communications indicating they were planning to murder the RCMP officers on site!
Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).
I was a resident of downtown Ottawa during this period. It was bad. We had a young kid and didn't feel even safe walking her to a park, because the route crossed over convoy lines and there were all sorts of stories of harassment and assaults. We didn't even experience the worst of it; lots of people dealt with truck horns blaring 24/7, but at least our street at least was kept clear as an emergency route.
We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.
I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.
Its interesting how as of late the working-class's totally self-sabatoging ways of protesting almost universally piss off their fellow men and women, rather than taking their grievances to the powers that support them.
There's been massive popular protests in France, Germany and Great Britain in the past few years. Maybe in more countries? But they don't always get media coverage. One that you should have heard of is the yellow vest protests in France.
Im French, my anecdotal opinion is the same as the Canadian parent comment: they block and destroy, propose nothing realistic and end up pissing everyone off. I vote Macron as a result.
Aren't that the only forms of protest that are allowed?
If I remember properly, offering the service for free (for instance in public transport) bear the risk of being held personally responsible of any damage or accident that would happen to anyone (which is not unlikely if you factor in provocations)
These are just the things that were recorded, reported on, and archived with the links functioning three years later. Scroll up and you can read about what many of us saw in person. And yes, there's more where that came from. But it's much better to read from people who live in Ottawa and want to share their experiences: https://www.opc-cpo.ca/
Thanks for the list! I can say that three of the stories I was referring to above are the ones listed as "Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work", "Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag" and "Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building".
The first and second happened only a couple blocks away from us, and we frequented both businesses, so it was infuriating to see them and their employers attacked like that. We lived in an apartment building so the third one was pretty alarming.
Not sure which town got the prominent coverage, but here in America a lot of the coverage we saw looked like a peaceful presence, organized to allow emergency passage, and frequently we saw what looked like a fair - lots of families strolling through, eating food, adults and kids dancing, buying random things from vendors. We saw interviews with drivers who told their stories and said they were there to peacefully protest, as was their right. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that the actions by Trudeau seemed so disproportionate.
A lot of the family-friendly stuff was specifically for the cameras. A few things I can speak to:
* It definitely wasn't peaceful -- activists and Ottawa residents documented numerous incidents of violence, harassment, threats, vandalism, and so on in Ottawa. This document compiles some of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...
* Organizers encouraged participants to bring more children when it became clear police action was imminent, presumably to complicate law enforcement efforts. A Facebook post even suggested adding bouncy castles to "contribute to the fun" during these escalations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/freedom-conv...
I live in Ottawa. We were failed by all levels of government, our police services, and our intelligence services.
The convoy drove across the country, broadcasting their intentions on social media. Yet, everyone acted shocked when they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau, but they were completely disrespectful to other citizens, and I could never defend their actions. However, irrespective of how unpopular their actions were, the courts have deemed the federal government's response unreasonable and unconstitutional, and I agree with that assessment.
The government could have dealt with this earlier and more directly, but whatever passes for "leadership" these days in Canada has proven itself completely inept.
Personally, I would like to see an inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, but I guess that’s not considered a pressing issue anymore.
> I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit
The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.
Perhaps bad phrasing, it is an emotional issue having lived through it.
I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things. This includes the right to express dissent against other citizens to whom we have delegated certain decision-making responsibilities. A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
At the time, I think we were also in stage 2 lockdown(which should have been enough to stop it), so the people bearing the brunt of these actions, whatever you want to label it as, were not the ones making those decisions. Our elected officials don't live inside Parliament Hill.
> I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things
That is what a protest is. The collective agrees, not their rulers.
> A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
I don't agree here, and even if that were so, there's a stark difference between the original intention and the ultimate use of permission as a tool.
I don't agree with your last point. In a democracy, we have elections at a cadence. If you disagree with protest permits, you are welcome to stand up in the next election, or vote for a representative who will.
We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.
I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.
In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; therefore, I don’t need permission, which is discretionary.
Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.
>In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
Playing devil's advocate here: what if it wasn't mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What if the CRF didn't exist to start with?
(my point being that when things are very bad, certain things need to be done regardless of what a formal law states, you cannot let tyranny call the shots)
The monarch of Canada is the King of Canada. It's a completely separate role from the King of the UK even though it's the same person. Canada isn't ruled by the British King.
You don't need a permit to protest in Ottawa, on foot, unamplified in a location where you do not block others. You do need a permit to block the streets with your protest. Those are readily and regularly granted -- if the city didn't grant them the courts will force them to. Once you get that permit, you'll get a police escort to block the street for you.
I took part in one political protest in my life. The leaders spent most of their efforts screaming at us “stay out of the road and don’t block the sidewalk!”
We were encouraged to bring our kids, and criticized by the opposition for doing so. Our kids had a great time and learned the value political participation.
The protest was 100% successful at it achieving its one, narrow aim.
>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau
I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".
There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.
The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.
>There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.
If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).
>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.
>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?
>and none of what the protesters did mattered.
We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.
>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted
Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the friggen obvious move of asking the police to unblock the roads by force, and impounding the vehicles for repeat offences. Going after bank accounts was a coward move that never made sense. If I just sat down in the middle of a subway tunnel, I would be removed by force immediately, no matter what I was protesting. They created problems for themselves by not doing the obvious solution.
Blocking a road is a fire hazard and should never have been tolerated by local police for that reason alone. You cannot impede transit in a city.
If only more people A) asked this question and B) looked into what was (not) happening.
Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".
> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.
There is room for two failures. The province should have enforced the provincial law, and the feds should not have have taken action through the banking sector.
My preference would be that the fed enforce the laws on the books themselves (if they have the power to do so), or pressure the province to do so (using the democratic leverage available).
There’s no federal police, the government can make their resources available but it’s up to the province to use them or not. And sure, you could use funding, but there’s no guarantee that that would have solved the problem. The province could have kept digging their heels in.
Sure, but like I said the federal government can’t deploy them, only the provinces. And the premier of Ontario is a drug addict nimby conservative that hates trudeau, so he refused to do anything about it.
Interesting, I'm somewhat shocked that the fed has no ability to direct and deploy the Mounties, but I wont argue with a Canadian. That said, I think the democratic solution is to act through ones representatives, impeach the premier, ect.
I also dont see why the emergency act, if declared, couldn't be used to enforce existing laws and remove the truckers.
I think my core point is that there are conventional and broadly accepted methods to take when people are breaking the law. People breaking the law does not provide a blank check to stop them by any means desired.
It’s a whole thing because Quebec threatened to secede in the 80s, so the federal government doesn’t intervene unless provinces ask for it. I’m not sure about the legal basis for it either though hahaha.
And like, I agree with you in general, I just don’t see the action as an abuse of power. The economic intervention was also accompanied by on the ground action, as you said should have happened. At the time there were lots of questions about foreign interference in funding the protest, that’s why their accounts were frozen.
I don't know exactly how Federalism works in Canada but the answer is their jobs. If that doesn't entail stepping in to provincial business, they shouldn't do anything.
Trudeau was the one who triggered the protests in the first place.
The liberal, moral, fast and peaceful solution to the trucker protests was simple: stop forcing people to take experimental drugs against their will. The vaccines didn't reduce transmission, and there is no rule against living life in a risky way (even if you believe the vaccines worked at all), so there was never any moral argument for the mandates. The truckers were right to protest, as Trudeau and the Canadian people were doing them a severe injustice.
Then you best blame the US gov't even more so, since it was Trudeau's gov't that had the vaccine mandate for truckers delayed by 6 months and it was only the insistence of the US gov't that this policy was forced in.
Please, this is just preposterous.
Two seconds of attention to who the key leaders of this "protest" were should cause you to question its legitimacy.
Every single vaccine or gathering mandate I experienced was either provincial (Conservatives) or municipal (also conservative for Toronto and georgetown where I live).that they barked up the completely wrong tree is the breathtakingly depressing stupidity behind the whole thing.
Don't believe me? Alberta Conservatives did not have same policies. Then they begged BC and Saskatchewan for ICU beds but that's besides the point - provinces and municipalities had freedom to enact different policies.
Also in Ontario. I am still very confused how none of this seems to have affected Doug Ford. This was the most mandated, school-closed, shut-things-down jurisdiction in North America at the time. And somehow Trudeau is apparently to blame for it all, and Ford is still... electable?
Meanwhile the feds only had jurisdiction over borders and airports. They acquired the vaccines, but it was the provinces that doled them out and set the policies for what would require them.
At the height of covid Ford even had outdoor ski hills shut down. Crazy times. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But I can tell you my neighbours with F Trudeau stickers were very angry about the vaccines, but still somehow are voting for Ford. Confusing.
Provincial governments were a mistake - the average Canadian fundamentally misunderstands the division of powers and responsibilities between federal and provincial governments, and this is remarkably useful for bad actors.
I personally think Chrétien was a terrible offender, since his balanced budgets in the 90’s were a result of pushing responsibilities on the provinces. The current wave of conservative provincial governments have similarly created their own problems (particularly with the international student explosion) while placing all of the blame of the federal government.
Harris/Klein + Chretien was a deadly combination, and more intimately connected than people will admit. Supposed ideological opponents, but the latter created the conditions for the former to thrive.
Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything. That's obviously by design and part of the demarcation of powers we expect from a democracy. The accusations of authoritarianism would have been just as drastic (I think?) if the PM had stood up and tried to call the RCMP or Ottawa police / OPP to task for their inaction and so on.
Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.
But that's not what I was arguing? Holding accountable is not the same as telling them what to do in terms of enforcement action.
This was actually discussed as a specific controversy at the time the convoy was undergoing. Trudeau getting on the phone with chief of police and asking him to clear the protest would be a serious breach of political standards in our democracy.
Also the police in question here are the Ottawa Police Service, not the RCMP, I believe.
Your phrasing is "do not have the power". Trudeau most certainly does have the power.
And I'd disagree about breeching political standards. The police are an executive function and report to the PM. I'd like to think Canadians know that.
The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."
The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.
Additionally regardless of formal "powers", no legitimate leader in any democratic govt wants to be seen "giving orders" to police forces -- that's entirely outside of democratic norms.
The federal govt sets standards and expectations and framework for the RCMP. It should not, and does not (hopefully), tell them what to do on specific case files.
It was something like the Ottawa police said they were unable to and Ford said it was a local issue or not a priority. He was onboard with emergency act as it helped with Windsor too.
This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151
If I'm reading this thread correctly, it sounds like truckers staged a protest in Canada blockading roads. The government couldn't move the trucks because the cops sympathized with the protestors. So the government debanked the truckers as well as anyone caught donating more than $20 to them. Damn.
It takes half a day to get the details over with a judge and decide exactly whose and what accounts to lock, those truckers were allowed to stay there for months. (And if you don't know what exactly to block, you shouldn't be allowed to block anything. Maybe you still have enough reason to look at their movement, maybe not.)
Also, it takes a couple of hours to get the police to unblock a road. Last time I checked, money movement in bank accounts does not block roads.
So the threat of violence against a non violent protest resulted in the non violent protestors being labeled terrorist and justified all the action that followed?
A quick search shows 120dB at 1m isn't abnormal for a truck air horn. A line of them from far enough away will decrease in level by 3dB per doubling of distance. 8 doublings would make it ~96dB at 256m.
It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.
Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here. The first of which is linked to a group called "Maru Group", whose website is dysfunctional. They are owned by Stagwell Marketing, whose CEO, Mark Penn, is directly linked to the US and Canadian Government, and more specifically to companies which were directly hurt by the trucking protest. Maru Group's sampling is tiny, they asked only 1500 people and they give no information on how they gathered this data.
Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.
For anything even remotely controversial, I stick exclusively with primary sources and ignore Wikipedia. The site is clearly compromised by admins who only want left-leaning secondary sources summarized. If you come across a controversial topic with biased, or even faulty information, the admins will remove edits which don’t comply with their bias, ban persistent users, and eventually “protect” the article. Even one of the co-founders has railed against the current state of the site.
It really should. I'm a PhD student (which does not overly qualify me anyway) but the more I look into works with quantitative measuring methods, the more I have a hard time trusting polls and statistics in general. Even in academic papers, or at least the ones I reviewed, more often than not the data is massaged in some way and leaves a lot to be desired.
It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.
That's really great work, thanks -- could you share a link to the 50% polls? This is probably worth porting back to the Wikipedia page to set the record straight.
They are also in the Wikipedia article, just further down. But what is really interesting is that the 66% source is dominantly cited in almost every single press article on the matter.
You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source. In this context, Wikipedia would be a tertiary source. Yes, I get that this is their mission statement, but I find that when citing secondary sources as truth, you have to be even more careful.
A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
>You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source.
No, I'm not. I cited a document titled "Wikipedia is a tertiary source" in order to establish that prominently citing secondary sources (which is what makes Wikipedia a tertiary source) is established Wikipedia policy (as described in the document).
Yes, it's stated there that tertiary sources can in principle cite primary sources directly. But in practice, if you try this, you'll be accused of violating Wikipedia policy: in particular, primary sources for anything vaguely political will not be considered reliable (even though the dependence on secondary sources from the approved list is a major source of bias) and if you can't find an acceptable secondary source then other editors will conclude that the material is not notable.
> A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
I agree; but as far as Wikipedians seem to be concerned, if newsletter XY is on the approved RS list, things that it says happened must have actually happened (and you'll only be allowed to challenge that with another source from the approved RS list; they'll say you're doing "original research" by pointing out directly that the poll doesn't actually say ABC, because that's, like, just your analysis of the poll).
Wikipedia is not concerned with truth, in that being able to disprove content in supposedly reliable sources doesn't entitle you to correct the material.
I don't know, but I live in the NCR, and few I know thought it was right.
The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.
I'm sure people directly affected agree with you, but it's been downhill for this regime since the trucker protest. We are literally still talking about it, right now.
I cannot comprehend how it could be overwhelmingly supported.
> An Economist/YouGov poll conducted from February 12 to 15 found that 80% of Americans had heard of the convoy protests. [...] Among Republicans, 71 per cent supported the convoy protests, compared to 18 per cent of Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Opinion_...)
When you consider how much attention the convoy got in America, and how sympathies fell on such partisan grounds, it gets more concerning. Suddenly, Canadian politics is a hunting ground for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, online bot mobs... I think you see where I’m going.
It’s difficult to approach these discussions and not feel like bad-faith actors are artificially making a bugbear out of it. This is especially true when many of the loudest defenders of the convoy weren’t even there, aren't even Canadian, and -- three years later -- may not even be people.
That said, I can agree the Emergencies Act probably shouldn't have been used here, and I have question marks about freezing people's bank accounts -- but this is really a conversation actual Canadians should be owning, since it concerns us most directly.
As a Canadian I haven't heard about the trucker protest since they happened. It was bizarre seeing it come up as the top discussion point in this thread and seems like a big mismatch between American and Canadian perception of what's going on.
It's absolutely astounding that there have not been harsher consequences for the police who abandoned their duty in Ottawa. Where is the of rule of law here?
Investigations and penalties for everyone up the chain, starting with the frontline officers who were on the ground refusing to issue tickets. If an officer chooses to not do their job over their political beliefs they do not belong on the force.
“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”
Same applies here. If 10 officers misbehave, it is easy to fire them all, as you suggest.
If a majority of the entire police force defects, your only choice is between limiting the scope of the punishment to a few ringleaders vs. basically disbanding the police force and starting a new one from scratch, hoping that you can even recruit enough people to do so; but, in the meantime, the city won't be policed anymore, as the entire institutional memory has been purged.
In most similar cases in history, the authorities opted for a blanket pardon, as it is much less of a headache.
It is not even a new problem. Police is a relatively recent institution, but armies, gendarmes, legions etc. rebelled all the time, and peace usually had to be bought by concessions.
It's not unheard of to disband and reconstitute a police department. I would argue its the right move when the organization as a whole has effectively gone rogue.
The most significant example I'm aware of is Camden New Jersey.
The city’s crime rate was among the worst in the US. Within nine square miles and among nearly 75,000 residents, there were over 170 open-air drug markets reported in 2013, county officials told CNN. Violent crime abounded. Police corruption was at the core.
Lawsuits filed against the department uncovered that officers routinely planted evidence on suspects, fabricated reports and committed perjury. After the corruption was exposed, courts overturned the convictions of 88 people, the ACLU reported in 2013.
So in 2012, officials voted to completely disband the department – it was beyond reform.
And in 2013, the Camden County Police Department officially began its tenure. No other city of Camden’s size has done anything quite like it.
Absolutely. I'm a paramedic. I will be in front of a licensing hearing defending why should be allowed to continue as a paramedic to the DOH if I refuse to treat a patient because of politics/beliefs, as an EMS provider.
Depending on the severity, I can even be facing administrative charges of patient abandonment under my state's Administrative Code for standards of care for providers.
Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition. In fact it did that twice in 50 years.
And only twenty people getting their rights completely stripped because they bothered the federal government workers in Ottawa is good enough according to you?
Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
Please don't cross into the flamewar style on HN. This comment is only dipping a toe in that direction, but still—it's the opposite direction to what we're trying for here.
Are you talking about the militant separatists who had already committed mailbombings and escalated to assasinating a government official and kidnapping a foreign diplomat on Canadian soil in 1970?
It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.
The Patriot act doesn't even come close to emergency powers. And the Patriot act would've been insanely worse if the US had the equivalent of our non withstanding clause.
So no, it hasn't been doing the same. Bush and his cronies sure would've wanted to go further though, I agree.
Also, another difference is that the Patriot act has been very controversial in the years since. Whereas the same hasn't been true in Canada for the usage of emergency power. And no one seems to care that we see more and more laws passed with the non-withstanding clause either.
> Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition.
As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).
> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.
Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:
> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;
> * But I hope you realize that it doesn't show anything. A federal or even provincial government can absolutely pass any law, with a simple majority, that doesn't respect the charter simply by invoking the non withstanding clause.*
And the use of the withstanding clause has to be re-up every five years, as that is the maximum time before a new election is held so that The People™ can decide if they want to continue with it:
> (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
> Can you show me a single piece of legislation that used that clause and that was still overturned?
The point of the clause was so that The People™, through their duly elected representatives, would have the final say in matters of government and not judges (who are potentially answerable to no one). Whether it should be judges that have the final say (like in the US) or legislators (like in the UK) is up for debate: in Canada it was decided to split the difference.
> But the point remains that the constitution is absolutely horrible for minorities.
Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.
See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.
You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).
Those are unrelated to the charter, and all of those have been allowed without using the non withstanding clause. As you said yourself, nothing in the charter says that gay people can't marry.
I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.
All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.
> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:
> 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.
"In 1971, official date of the birth of topos theory, unfortunately the dream team at
Dalhousie was dispersed. What happened, that made you go to Denmark ?
Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam
war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.
That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.
(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)
Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;
several political activists from various groups
across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.
I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.
The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.
Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.
Amazingly there is someone living very close to the airport where they found the body of the Deputy Premier of Quebec (Pierre Laporte) in 1970 that flies the flags of allegiance to the successors of the terrorists (i.e. the MNLQ following from the FLQ) from a pole in his yard for everyone on the highway to see.
For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.
yeah what people dont always understand (not saying you dont) is that FLQ supporters see themselves as basically being occupied by Anglo Canadians. Until the 60's there was entrenched discrimination in Montreal against catholics and french-speakers. The city even used to have two hockey teams, one for Anglos and one for Francos.
Ehh, I think a surprising amount of the Quebecois’ problems were self-inflicted by letting the Catholic Church run people’s lives, and the Quiet Revolution helped a lot. Like, it wasn’t the anglos bullying people’s grandmothers into having an eighth child after a rough pregnancy, the local priest would take a few minutes during mass to call her out in front of he whole community.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I would have found it useful if you wrote what exactly you find terrifying. It's often in this kind of discussions that someone says "Things said here are X", but there are things said on both sides and I literally cannot tell even which side the speaker is on.
It’s also so very weird that both sides of this issue are likely nodding their head agreeing with you. I couldn’t get a good inference on which side of the comments you meant, personal opinion and assumptions notwithstanding.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis.
Symbolic actions like painting "BLM" on a street are cute and all, but that doesn't mean they supported the protests. In fact, the cities such as New York and Chicago had some of the most violent suppression of protests by their police forces, despite loudly claiming to support BLM. Actions ultimately speak louder than words.
> At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., activated over 96,000 National Guard and State Guard service members.[33][34][35][36] The deployment constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[37]
Yes, I know since I was part of the protests back then. But there's an incredibly big difference between cracking down on a protest and invoking emergency powers.
In America, we didn’t need emergency powers to shoot BLM protesters. Or Civil Rights protesters, or the unarmed veterans of the Bonus Army, or union members — historically it’s fine to shoot protesters.
Conservatives are just snowflakes because it happened to their guys just one time.
Okay, so if I show you an example of a protest with people that weren't masking or social distancing, you'd be in favor of using emergency powers against protestors that were protesting for racial justice?
What glib nonsense. We had authoritarian right wing protesters -- who don't believe in democracy -- trying to topple our elected government. Imposing their will on the people in Ottawa for weeks, threatening violence and disturbing the peace.
i.e. Not constitutionally responsible to the people.
Words have meaning, as do actions, sir, and you're choose to ignore both because of your partisan blind spots.
> There was no "peaceful" presentation of grievance. There was weeks of civil disobedience and actual acts of violence.
Partisans love to play this game, where they judge a large group of people by the worst possible interpretation of the actions of a tiny subset of them.
For a protest which some estimates say peaked at ~18,000, this was the resulting set of "violent" charges:
"12 charges of assaulting a peace officer; six charges of assault; three charges of assault or intimidation with a weapon; five charges of possessing a weapon dangerous to public peace; two charges of carrying a concealed weapon; one charge of possessing a restricted firearm; and four charges of uttering threats of death or bodily harm." [0]
Obviously this is not acceptable, but the idea that the protesters as a group were "authoritarians" because 0.01% of them got violent is hysterical nonsense.
Charges were low because the police refused to do their job. This is stated on record.
(Also... Partisan hardly describes me. I've never voted Liberal in my life and have been opposed to this PM since day one. Ask any of my annoyed coworkers and friends.)
So only "bougie federal workers" live in Ottawa? And not being able to sleep for days on end is just "getting annoyed"
That's... amazing. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
And you're accusing me of convoluted scenarios.
This is deep down nested in replies of replies, so unlikely to be seen but...We have plenty of members of HN from Ottawa. Tell me, Ottawa people, what do you think of this?
And yes, they should have been arrested. Too bad the police refused to do their job.
Your account has been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. Would you please stop? Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
dang, it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating.
I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread. A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes. Context here is important given news in recent weeks, with Trudeau's name on the lips of people like Trump, Musk, etc.
I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point. I'm sure my passion is showing through, but it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out.
There are some issues which trigger emotional response. I usually don't get into the back and forth response, but this is a seriously frustrating thread and I think if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic (we have people driving around with bumper stickers reading "F* Trudeau" and this whole topic is tied in with COVID, vaccines, etc. etc.) will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic.
I'm sorry I couldn't respond to this sooner! I got started on a reply and then ended up on a flight with no wifi.
> it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating
I know, and I wish I had the cycles to clarify this in every case; it's just not possible. If you look at the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629499, I wrote a longer explanation about this for a different user who was asking the same thing (albeit rather less politely).
As a quick answer though, comments like these broke the site guidelines by using inflammatory rhetoric, cross-examination, calling names, snark, and crossing into personal attack:
Me too, so I spent hours moderating it and posted 20 or so requests to people to stop, as well as a general admonition at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616355.
> A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own
Such perceptions aren't reliable. Internet readers tend to back-fit such perceptions to their assumptions about who would be holding a given position and why; but these assumptions are frequently contradicted by the data. Since the perceptions mostly add to one's feelings of aggravation, it's best to remember that one doesn't actually know these things (e.g. who is posting from where) and suspend them.
Unfortunately we can't publish the data without violating people's privacy, but many comments opposing your views were posted from Canadian IP addresses and many comments supporting your views were posting from IP addresses outside Canada. Not a perfect indicator, but it's clear that this argument breaks down on ideological lines, not national lines.
> it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out
You were in no way being singled out, and certainly not given your citizenship! If you look through my other posts in this thread (not that I recommend it), you'll see how many other admonishments I posted. We're as careful as we know how to be to moderate HN based on the site guidelines, not people's views, let alone their nationality, background, or anything like that.
There were tons of other users breaking the site guidelines in this thread, but it wasn't possible to get to them all. Unfortunately people tend to jump to the conclusion, when they see a bad post going unmoderated, that the mods must secretly agree with it. Nothing could be further from true; most likely we just didn't see it.
> There are some issues which trigger emotional response.
Indeed there are. The question then becomes how well we each can regulate our emotional responses. Commenters here are asked to do that regardless of how wrong others are or one feels they are. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) can't do that without remaining respectful to others, it's best to wait until your activation has settled to the point when you can. That's not easy, of course, but it's doable. Your more recent comments in this thread, for example, have been fine.
> if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic
We do that much of the time but I don't believe it's either possible or desirable to do it all the time. For this community to fulfill its mandate, we need occasional cases of difficult and divisive topics getting frontpage discussion, and community members need to develop the maturity and self-regulation to be able to do it respectfully, remaining curious, even in the presence of others who are not doing that at all. Longstanding members have the most responsibility to do this.
It would be so much easier and less stressful not to take on that challenge, but then HN would be less than it might be, and it's our job to try to help it fulfill its potential.
Seriously? Do you know what the emergency powers entails? The Patriot act is not even remotely close. Like, not even 1% close. It's equivalent to martial law. It's such a weird whataboutism since it's not even close. It's a very Canadian response though, to assume that we are still better than those Americans even though it's objectively so much worse.
And okay, yeah that just proves my point. Since I'm not conservative, and I realize that the conservatives aren't any better for stuff like that. I absolutely would expect the conservatives to abuse federal power, but I expected better from the liberals. I volunteered for Trudeau's campaign twice, and met him when I got my citizenship when he was a local MP. That's why i was so disappointed.
It is funny to see this almost telegraphed response to my point (what about the us, what about the conservatives). Like sure, yes, no party in Canada would be better than this. But that's the entire point, and that's abhorrent.
Would you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? I asked you upthread not to go in that direction, and instead you've gone full bore in that direction. Not cool.
(I don't care what side of the argument people are on—I care who is breaking the site guidelines and making HN a more hellish place.)
Maybe it's because other countries are too soft (talking from the perspective of a French who saw suburbs in fire because some people did not want to stop when the police told them so).
The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.
The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.
And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.
The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.
Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.
As I'm just a lowly computer technician, no I do not get to choose who gets rights. That is typically the domain of judges, lawmakers, and more fundamentally the founders of nations.
Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
That's absolutely not what a blockade is. Again, by your logic, everyone that was part of the Oka Crisis should've been treated as a foreign enemy or a traitor, and prosecuted as such. I mean, they were armed and wanted indépendance. Yet that's not how it works when you are talking about Canadian citizens.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
I guess you're right. A blockade, by definition, is to "render [something] unsuitable for passage". They often have the impact of disallowing goods, people, aid etc from crossing a border (especially when a blockader says "I am blockading to prevent the passage of goods"), but I take your point.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?
So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.
A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).
The amendment process is slow and complex by design. It's not just a one-off supermajority, but rather a supermajority in both houses of Congress (or a special amending convention) followed by a supermajority of states each individually ratifying a proposed amendment. The most recent constitutional amendment took over 200 years to be ratified.
The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.
The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.
I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.
My comment was about democracies and their constitutions in general. I’m neither Canadian nor American. Yes, there are significant degrees in how easy or hard it is, but in the end if you have a sufficiently large majority that wants to deprive a minority of their rights, the mere fact of having a democracy by itself doesn’t prevent it.
In fact, democracy in itself might enable that, which is why it's important to have strong boundaries around all political decision-making, whether democratic or otherwise.
I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:
>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.
I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?
> A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter
This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.
For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.
> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.
The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.
It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.
> I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have.
What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.
I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.
America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.
And that designed failed spectacularly from the beginning. As the post you're replying to points out, slavery is essentially the majority deciding that a minority and their descendants have no rights whatsoever. This state of affairs lasted until the 1860s and even then those rights for the minority were severely curtailed until at least the 1960s.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly. The trade-off was well known amongst many even at the founding of america. There would simply be no America if slavery was disallowed from the beginning.
A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.
Was there a majority that was pro-slavery? My understanding was the agreement was that it was a minority that wanted slavery, and that slavery would be kept to that minorities states?
The Puritans were a minority group among the original settlers to the US, among the Dutch, French, Spanish, other British settlers and others. The founders and architects of the Constitution and US government were not Puritans.
The federal response was largely due to the abject failure of the city & provincial governments to enforce their laws. The city and province had plenty of tools to get rid of the protesters: noise bylaws, parking bylaws, et cetera. They failed completely, so the Federal government was forced to intervene. The federal government did not have nuanced tools to deal with the truckers so used the blunt hammers they did have.
That's basically what happened. Between the three police forces, the jurisdiction was unclear. Parliamentary police and city police could not decide which laws to enforce as it depended on where the protestors were located. The province mostly polices highways and small townships that cannot afford their own police force. They quickly regained control of the highways to divert any additional incoming trucks but couldn't step in within city limits for trucks that were already there.
Can you explain what these illegal orders were, within the purview of Sloly's role as police chief? Also, who is the second Ottawa police chief you're talking about? For that matter, who is the third one? Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
> Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
I don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion about much of this, but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation. I've personally witnessed many people resigning and giving reasons like "to focus on my family" or "to focus on my health" or something when in reality they were parachuting out before getting fired or were resigning for other reasons but didn't want to burn a bridge by telling the truth. I wouldn't be surprised if being untruthful (or only partially truthful) in resignations is more the norm than is being honest, and when talking about politics that probably goes up even more.
>but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation.
I don't even see a contradiction in the first place. Of course someone who perceives received orders as illegal, and feels strongly enough about it to consider resigning, would "fail to perform" those orders.
I stand corrected that it Sloly was the 2nd police chief during the protest, not sure how or when I warped that in my mind to thinking that he was the 2nd resignation.
My point still stands though and as you say: he was pressured to resign because he wouldn't do what the politicians were demanding of him - which is in line with your "failure to perform" claim.
The actions then done under the Emergencies Act to "clear" the Freedom Convoy from downtown were found to have been illegally invoked.
And you know crime in Ottawa went down during the Freedom Convoy too, right?
Have you put your shoes in the Freedom Convoy participants at all I wonder to balance your perspective? Do you care about the RCMP horses trampling and breaking bones of an elder disabled indigenous woman, who just moments before was basically preaching about love and peace?
I can find that video for you if you'd like, if you haven't seen it.
Otherwise it's not worth it to put anymore of my time to debate this one on one, when I'm responding to someone who tries to support their argument with "when most sources agree" without citing any sources, and where I can predict which sources you'll cite.
At some point they stopped being protestors and became occupiers. There is no Charter right to occupy—as the pro-Palestinian folks also learned [1] (which was simply re-iterating previous precedent, see perhaps [2]).
It's quite clear what the limits are for protests in Ottawa. There are dozens to hundreds of protesters in Ottawa continuously. There are regularly protests of thousands of people. If you want to block the road, you get a parade permit which is easy to get. You can shout as long as you want, but if you use an amplifier the police will eventually take it away from you. You can carry obnoxious signs. Blocked roads because of protests are an annoying fact of life in Ottawa. But you shrug and move on, it's a cost of living/working in downtown Ottawa. I've never seen a protest block the road for more than 4 hours.
Yes, they harassed people, they cornered people, yes they restricted access to stores, buildings, and yes they used their truck horns to attack local residents by preventing them being able to sleep for days on end. Preventing people from sleeping via loud noise is literally considered a torture tactic.
You've repeatedly been posting in the flamewar style to this thread. That's not ok, as you know (or ought to, having been here for a good 14 years), so please stop.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this countless times, and you've continued to break the site guidelines badly, including in other threads than this. I'm not going to ban you right now, just as I haven't banned a different flamewar commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615795), but the same things apply to you as I said to them: this is not ok, and if you don't want to be banned here we need you to fix this once and for all.
It's fascinating how the same arguments can apply to the homeless, but how one sees the homeless vs. the truck protestors is likely to be polar opposites with one group free to stay as they aren't infringing on any rights, and the other group being a nuisance and having to go expeditiously. Which group is tolerated largely depends on your political alignment.
In what world is it ok to subject people to sleep deprivation techniques because “ear plugs exist”? That’s basically saying “I am allowed to enact violence on you, because painkillers exist”.
In addition to how absurd that is, I don’t think this would pass any kind of “pub test”.
YSK that the people who had their accounts frozen weren't simply protesting in Ottawa; they were blocking international borders to our largest trading partner, effectively holding our economy hostage. This absolutely constitutes behavior that's a danger to our nation so it makes sense to freeze the accounts of the people doing it. To be clear, there were many attempts to settle this without freezing people's bank accounts, but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
That logic seems like it would outlaw labor strikes too, especially in important industries. Sometimes, holding the economy hostage is the point.
I take exception to the framing of “attempts to settle this.” The government used violence and threat of violence to make the problem go away. There wasn’t an attempt at compromise. Do what I say or else isn’t an attempt to settle.
That's how analogies are supposed to work. How do you expect civil society to function if people only supported civil disobedience when it's their preferred cause?
The recent postal strikes in Canada are an example of the situation you're describing. Eventually the federal government had to step in and break the strike to get the mail system moving again - if the workers refused to comply, against the orders of the government, I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.
The government should be able to force people to work under worse conditions and less pay they want to? That’s ok if most Canadians support it? Really? I hope you can appreciate just how dangerous this sounds, even if you think my slippery slope has a lot of traction on it.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about labor strikes? If customs, border control, longshoremen, or some other union decided to strike and picket would you support having the feds declare them terrorists and doing the banking thing?
This is what a protest is. (French here). If protesters go as far, and in Canada it was because you did them dirty, then you must sit at a table and negotiate. You must sit at a table and negotiate with everyone in a country. You cannot do someone dirty then complain that they protest.
It’s effects removing the right to protest, and therefore, removing democracy itself. Go live in Singapore?
They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).
If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.
Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.
Not a Canadian, but no, a protest protests and gives voice to the disagreement. Blocking other people's rights is not just a protest and is likely to trigger action to protect others. That's how it goes everywhere that has rights. Normally, some effort is made to do it peacefully, but there are no countries where you can halt the economy whenever you want to force people to negotiate with you.
I don't agree. There were a bunch of university protests over Gaza (slapped down for stupid reasons by university administrators under pressure from government), and, really, they just made noise, but they got a lot of people to notice, including myself. And to ask ourselves, what do I think about this?
If you are expecting protests to force someone's hand, that isn't protest or protected political speech, that's coercion. Some forms of that are legal (e.g., strikes), but there are pretty sharply defined limits.
That's a good point, but the Gaza protesters would of course counter that they were slapped down (for stupid reasons) and the war in Gaza (which is illegal and genocidal, though initially provoked by Hamas) continues to be supported. So their protest, while not useless, wasn't effective in bringing change.
Preferably online, but not on a website that everyone sees. Something silent. On the side. Also please have the dignity to die in peace, not commit suicide in a place where everyone can see it.
I mean, this is the French way. SNCF striking (a yearly occurrence) is arguably halting the economy each time it happens.
As a sympathizer to the HK protests, I've heard all these talking points before -- that the protesters are ruining the economy and making things miserable for everyone. Usually the protests can really only get so big when there is a shared grievance that keeps getting ignored by the administration.
In the case of HK, the grievance was the possibility for criminals to be extradited to Chinese mainland.
In the case of convoy protests, the grievance was the vaccine mandate in order to work a trucking job that's mostly solitary with minimal human contact.
Speaking as someone who has been in dozens of protests in my life: yes, that is what protest is, and as a protester engaging in civil disobedience you expect the response from authorities. That is exactly the point. When I have been on the receiving end of tear gas, there was no surprise. Big duh.
Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.
They weren't punished by the law though, they were debanked in an era where you need to use the banks to eat, pay rent and to merely survive. That is above and beyond any legal punishment. It is economic banishment and it is se excessive that it alone should be shunned by any person who wants civilization to survive.
Please, disagreeing on a topic and providing arguments is one thing, but suggesting somebody go live in another country because you don’t agree with them on something that happened in their country is disrespectful.
I mean, the South in the US waged a really big protest because they wanted slaves, and we murdered each other enough that they sort of changed their mind. Not every political grievance is on the right side of history.
Stop Oil glue themselves to the road in cities as a protest, disrupting the economic output of major cities. They haven't been treated like a terrorist organisation.
Actually the Harper gov't passed laws when in power that enabled them to treat such protests against fossil fuels as terrorist or threat-to-national-security events.
And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...
I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.
>but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
> Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
Nobody went after anyone's family.
If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.
People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.
I think this is better framed as "joined the protest", from the perspective of the police. As a US analogy, sanctuary cities or states with "legalized" marijuana have police who are refusing to do their job. Should thenfederal government freeze the accounta of police officers until they do?
If the thing your doing is causing such unrest, perhaps the government shouldn't be doing that thing.
> The truckers were warned what would happen, and they made their families pay the price.
This is a terrifying comment and you should really start re-examining your outlook on life. I really hope you are nowhere near any sort of lever of power.
> But Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were both convicted on other charges of mischief and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. Olienick was also convicted of possessing a pipe bomb.
> "It was an overcharge to begin with," Beyak said.
> He said if police tried to storm the barricade, he would "slit their throats."
They won't tell you this because the patchwork of regulations makes it literally impossible to do so legally but a very large minority, perhaps brushing up to scant majority depending on where you measure, of truckers in North America pack heat. They're in and out of all sorts of sketchy places all the time, never have local knowledge and would be insanely easy pickings for various types of career criminals if they (as a class of people) were not a risky target.
Can't speak for Canada, but this is definitely true in the US. I have no data other than my girlfriends dad (who I spent a lot of time with) was a trucker who refused to carry (and was a big fan of Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11, mentioned so you know his bias) who got into a lot of debates with his coworkers about it. In the western US where the gun laws are more friendly, "damn near everyone" kept at least a pistol. At one point he actually started carrying as well after getting (wrongly, he claims :-D) roughed up by a pimp at a remote truck stop.
Fortunate for him, he benefit from all his coworkers having a pu lic reputation for packing heat even though he didn't approve of it himself. The criminals who might otherwise try to take advantage of him wouldn't know that he was unarmed, but would be wary of truckers in general.
I think the implication was that he may have had some hand (or other body part) in the creation of that situation. It wasn't just some criminals saying "oh, a trucker, this will be easy money".
Not sure that distinction matters? In the “guns prevent violence” framing, the pander should have been afraid of the alleged john being armed, and not attempted physical violence.
You could be right, but it could also be that it was common knowledge that he was anti-gun because he never was shy of sharing his opinion, and it's very common for the same truckers to do the same routes repeatedly. I don't think there's enough evidence either way in this anecdote to make any reasonable conclusions.
If you think criminals don't consider the risk of being shot when picking their targets, I'm afraid it is you who is fantasizing. Robberies aren't "crimes of passion" where emotions overrule normal common sense.
I don't know about the details of this prosecution, but having served on juries, it is important to remember than "not guilty" is a finding that the government didn't meet the burden of proof, not necessarily a finding of actual innocence. That article would certainly suggest that they were prepared for violence, even if acquitted on the most serious charge.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
This seems like a pretty big conclusion to reach based on one article and one topic, no? Especially when you, in the same sentence, also recognize that you don't follow Canadian politics?
Debanking someone in our current society is the most abusive things they could have done. It prevented people from accessing and using their own money in an era that is almost cashless. It effectively starved people out and left them trapped. It is so excessively overboard, yet there are those here who will defend it because it happened to those not on their side. When the government changes and it is used against them they will shout and holler with surprise. I'll never understand how people don't see how something that you allow the government to do to others will eventually be used against you too. It's only happened every goddamn time throughout history.
> Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.
Find this extremely annoying, especially in search results: I want to start at the beginning of the article/post, and not some random place in the middle—which is where the highlighted snippet in the search results are from, but not helpful for learning the larger context.
It also tends to mess up URLS that you may want to copy-paste as it has that text parameter garbage at the end (often with a sizeable amount of text that needs to be removed).
Agreed. I'm in the minority I'm sure, but I think this is an anti-feature. In addition to your good points, it's also very fragile as a small change in the text of the page can break the link. It also leads to monstrous URLs that are quite hard to read for people who don't know about this feature.
It's a great way to link to the source of a verbatim quote, though. It goes straight to the relevant context, and breaks only if the source of the quote itself is somehow changed, making the new inconsistency clear.
I've seen it used countless times before, but I thought it was something somehow being injected into the page by a search engine (especially when it comes from custom site searches on forums), rather than a browser feature.
I don’t follow Canadian politics, and I don’t know that much about Trudeau, but having the capital full of honking, mad truckers, holding the government hostage for their demands to be met in a time of crisis sounds like an absolute nightmare.
There had already been one standoff between local residents and truckers, I remember there being chatter that the next weekend groups were going to coordinate in their neighborhoods and drive out the convoy on their own (using baseball bats, cast iron skillets, or golf clubs if need be). The situation had the potential to turn into an absolute blood bath.
In the US some psychopath straight up shot and killed a climate activist who was in the way of his car. It’s a miracle something similar didn’t happen there.
OP is probably conflating the environmentalist protestor shot in the US by cops and the numerous racial justice protestors killed by motorists, along with the incident you mentioned. Easy mistake to make.
Do we think it might be a little intellectually dishonest to equate a peaceful political protest with an armed hostage-taker?
I think this is important regardless of whether you believe in their specific target of protest or not. The right to peacefully protest is very very important, and your feelings on a specific protest should be wholly divorced from the importance of preserving the right to protest in general.
Nobody was held hostage. People unhappy with their rulers took peacefully to the streets and made noise and peacefully and temporarily interfered with some business activity.
This is the furthest thing from “holding the government hostage”. It’s the adversarial relationship between the populace and the state working exactly as intended and designed.
Armed hostage-taker? It’s unfortunate you feel the need to misrepresent my position rather than address the real issue.
This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.
It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.
For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.
“holding [whatever] hostage” means an armed attacker and threat to life. It’s no misrepresentation, you were using exaggerated and hyperbolic terms to describe a peaceful protest.
Nobody’s safety was jeopardized. Some disruption is the point of a protest; you can’t operate the building during a sit-in, for example.
“protest in a way that doesn’t affect anything and allows society to ignore you” is not a legitimate or constructive type of feedback.
>'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #&$#ed up has happened."
Wait, are people that shocked that their democratic governments are wiling to act like mobsters/dictators against a minority group just to get their way and appease a majority, when the history books are full of such examples? People must have a short memory then and why history repeating itself is a fact.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? Your account unfortunately has been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
To be clear, is "Anyone who doesn't like this should think about which members of their immediate family they want included in that 70,000 deaths." not also the same sort of flamewar style?
Indeed it is, and I posted a similar moderation request to that user (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614856) 37 seconds after posting the GP. I'm afraid I operate serially!
You know what would actually help dang? Actually telling what exactly was flamewar about that comment instead of flexing the mod status and being biased and double standard with your selective enforcement bs just because some butthurt pussies here abuse the flag button? Talk to them instead to stop that abuse.
What exactly was flamewar about posting that countries of people aren't guinea pig cages? Go on, enlighten me please. What rule did that comment break? Did you even read my comment or are you swinging your hammer based on people abusing the flag button?
I know that a detailed personalized response is more helpful, but it's impossible to do that in every case because it's so time consuming. I could spend all waking hours doing nothing but that and still only cover a fraction of the customized explanations that people want—even before counting the fact that many explanations generate further questions that need further explanation. So we have to get by with shorthand most of the time.
In your case, I wasn't just responding to one comment but to your pattern of commenting; note the word "repeatedly" in my post. That's a reference to other comments like these, from the current thread:
Your pattern of commenting includes inflammatory rhetoric, being aggressive to other users, cross-examination, name-calling, political and ideological battle, sneering at the rest of the community, and other things that clearly break the HN guidelines–and that's just with your current account.
It's true that your comment that I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612748) was one of the lesser cases of this, but it still included inflammatory rhetoric ("and if my mom had balls she's be my dad" adds no information—it's just a putdown, and ditto for "America, Australia, Canada, Europe etc, aren't interchangeable lab cages of guinea pigs", since no one is arguing that they are). But the rest of that comment was fine. The reason I replied there is not because I thought it was the worst case, but because it was a leaf node in the thread.
In any case, the issue (as I said) is the pattern. You're breaking the site guidelines so often that your account is on the line of being one that we would ban, if not already over the line.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've had to ask you this so many times I don't even want to bother digging up all the links. As I'm sure I've said more than once before, we'll have to ban you if you keep this up, so please just stop.
How bad were the covid restrictions in Canada that the truckers were complaining about in 2022? By 2022 most of the world had gone back to normal business-as-usual. Why were they even protesting? As an outsider looking in, it seemed like a mix of ignorance, propaganda, and stupidity made them do it.
Without looking up the specifics, by the time of the convoy, the vast majority of covid restrictions were gone. They liked to complain about vaccine passports, which Canada had, but by 2022 the vaccine passports were gone everywhere except the US border, by the request of the US government. So, from the outside, these guys were protesting and occupying Ottawa over actions of the US government. On the other hand, these guys don't really like being talked down to no matter what the elites say the real problem is. It started as a protest against vaccine passports but really turned into a ragefest against the establishment.
It's important to note that some of the key people who were behind these protests were not truckers, but were involved in earlier attempts at mass protest in Ottawa as part of the 'yellow vests' group from 2019
How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions? They can't, that's how. Again, it's stupidity, ignorance, and probably some propaganda/misinformation that spurred them on.
"How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions?:"
They can protest (which they did) and Justin Trudeau could have picked up the phone and call Biden and ask to remove the restriction, which at that time of the pandemic was completely useless. Instead, Justin Trudeau played politics, he figured it was much better for him to divide the population on the issue than actually work with its biggest trade partner to remove the restriction.
Thing is that Canada already had the mandate delayed once by request to the US prior to it coming into effect, I believe it was 6 months delayed already.
The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.
Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.
The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)
The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.
As a Canadian I can say that most people I know have opinions about the protests and the government's response, but that whole affair is about 1,000th on the list of grievances we have with our current federal government.
It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.
The protests lasted quite a long time and I think the public's opinion on it changed over time.
At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event
After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!
There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.
I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.
Thanks for replying. As a non-Canadian, your response has been more informative than the weeks I spent reading Twitter trying to figure out what was happening.
Now we're getting into the real meat of the questions. I love Kraft Dinner, in a somewhat ironic way. The best way to eat it is to add hot dog slices while cooking the pasta, then top it with ketchup. You can also have it with hot dogs and beans on the side (as my dad would call it, "beans and wieners and Kraft Dinner") It sounds disgusting, but its comfort food. Not sure if I would like it if I hadn't grown up eating it.
It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.
> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+
> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.
> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.
> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.
> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)
> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.
> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.
You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?
It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)
Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.
I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...
Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.
I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.
That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?
Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.
The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.
What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.
Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.
I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.
And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.
People on hn seem weirdly obsessed with trudeau's handling of the trucker protest. Regardless of what you think of it, at this point it is very old news and trudeau's actions were controversial but largely popular.
The handling of the trucker protest is not why he resigned. It is not why he is unpopular.
I’ve noticed a ton of non-Canadians like to reference this event as if it’s some incredible example of government tyranny gone too far. Nearly anyone who lived in Ottawa during this time (like me) would say the police completely failed the city, and the “protests” went on for literal weeks too long due to inaction and incompetence by all levels of government.
I live and work with mostly conservatives and none of them supported the truckers nor do they even mention it. Their grievances are more typical - inflation, taxes, and immigration.
I think we need to be careful when reading these opinions to not mix up Americans’ views, Russian trolls with legitimate Canadian discourse.
Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics. Heck the moderators refused to allow any criticism of the monarchy when the queen died but allowed it when Jimmy Carter died.
While I agree with patio11's assessment here, if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them.
Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.
Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?
It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.
Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.
Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.
South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.
Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.
You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.
Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.
When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.
I'll play: we can find 1m² of road in the residential area that is obviously not residential. Now we have two counterexamples that conflict. Logically the premise is meaningless.
i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.
Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.
It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.
Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.
No they're not, at least not in Ottawa at 2AM. They might do a quick blip at an intersection but generally they run silent. There was a massive difference between the train horns and the sirens. The horns were continuous, sirens are very occasional and short.
If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.
For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.
The loud noise is a rare and short event, not a nightly recurring occurrence of a long loud continuous blare. If it was as you say, then the protestors wouldn’t be doing it to gain attention.
Yes, a group of people decided that the only way to get their message across was to be assholes for a while.
I would label this as an inconvenience.
A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.
Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.
I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.
I don’t think it’s terrorism but that’s not why the back accounts were frozen.
The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.
The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.
Who has called the truck horns terrorism? I see people calling sleep deprivation torture, and I see people calling an armed border occupation terrorism.
At a minimum they were actually taking proactive action to be nuisances in solidarity with terrorists. Whether that makes you a terrorist I don’t know, but historically governments frown on those providing any kind of support to terrorists and tend to use the transitive property when dealing with such actions.
Are you trying to compare an emergency vehicle -- which is there to save someone's life -- with someone blasting a train horn outside your house to harass your neighbourhood as a deliberate political tactic? Are you looking to imply that all noises, for all reasons, at all hours, are equal, and therefore what they did is beyond reproach?
As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?
> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.
I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.
The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.
There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.
> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.
Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)
1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.
And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.
Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.
I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.
And yet if you go there at commuter times and spend 5 minutes just observing, I'm sure you'll feel the same way.
The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.
I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.
I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.
It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.
> Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system.
Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.
It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)
> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point
> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone
Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?
I mean, are we really nth-handed? The sad thing about, as they say "Sleeping with the Elephant" is you get first hand experience of the elephant's ... movements ... even if they never notice yours.
Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns
"I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone."
As somebody who lived in Ottawa at the time, this was not good coverage. Neither was DHH's. It was incredibly rage-inducing to read in real time as it was happening too. My takeaway from this is that one should minimize the confidence in one's opinion of foreign events.
There were four people with Nazi flags in the beginning who disappeared almost instantly. A classic way of discrediting a protest. (A real Nazi however received a warm reception in the Canadian parliament: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66943005)
No one had a pro-Putin sign? Why would they? At that time Putin was sitting at 20m long tables, which should have pleased Fauci himself. Putin was "following the science"!
I'm really opposed to this classic way of mixing an imaginary "far right" with Putin as if they do not have their own grievances.
You are right about the honking, which should have been dealt with more quickly but stopped after an injunction after a couple of days.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?
Niche view? Nobody likes Trudeau, not even is own party that is why they are pressuring him to step down. The comment you are commenting on might not be well thought out or in depth but it is how MANY average Canadians feel.
Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:
"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."
I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
(You'll have to Ctrl+F trucker as this blog doesn't seem to have <a name> for headings, as is customary on e.g. Wikipedia.)