That is an exaggerated headline. Accounts being used to fund illegal activities can be frozen. Protesting is not and will not be illegal. Blocking critical infrastructure is illegal.
That's like saying civil forfeiture is ok because the police will only ever take things from people involved with actual crimes, and that if you're not doing crime you have nothing to worry about. Do you forget how things are manipulated by people with power?
> The top donation, $215,000, has a comment that says “processed but not recorded.” The next top donation, at $90,000, is listed as from Thomas M. Siebel. CTV News has reached out to the American billionaire by the same name but has not confirmed it is his donation.
> The inquiry launched by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s government into the scale of foreign funds aimed at damaging the province’s oil and gas industry has issued its long-awaited report, finding that foreign donors provided nearly $1.3 billion in funds for Canadian environmental campaigns between 2003 and 2019.
Why is it wrong? When Indian farmers started theirs money poured in from all over the world. When Nigerians started theirs same thing happened. Why should Canada be different?
BLM protesters have been promptly arrested when they blocked streets or failed to disperse when the police ordered it, often rather violently. If these protesters want to get the same treatment BLM protesters got, they may well regret it.
In Portland Oregon, BLM spray painted buildings, burnt many things in the middle of the road and sidewalks, destroyed property, physically assaulted, broke windows, and ripped down bus stops and statues. They formulated an incursion into a state building putting the lives of Oregon's law officers in jeopardy (Molotov cocktails throw at them).
Depending on your persuasion, you might argue some justification occurred in Minneapolis Minnesota. But there are clearly limits when destruction of property and looting fall far outside of any tenuous reflection of social unrest. (Target?)
Seattle Washington was worse. Much much worse. The city directed their police force to yield a central block of the city to armed rebellion. People, one as I recall completely innocent, were shot and killed.
There was not the immediacy nor the widespread arrests to match the level of violence and destruction in these three locations. In terms of accuracy and spirit I believe you have missed the mark in your description of action and response.
There have been some good points in this thread otherwise and I'm still thinking about them. But you would be better served by re-evaluating your position on this topic.
Mid-level police commanders unilaterally decided to abandon the precinct, which allowed CHAZ to form. Not “the city,” and not in the face of “armed rebellion.”
(Yes, there were guns and unfortunate violence later: after the police left. Their job is maintaining public order; they failed.)
The police job in the history of modern republics was never to maintain "public order", unless by that you mean preventing disruption of existing systems of privilege. I can only recommend reading Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish" about the society of control, and the roles of the police and judicial system.
Hello, that's a good point! We should always point out pedophilia where it's hiding. However, from previous readings and from following the linked sources of that Wikipedia article, i don't think that Foucault was a pedophile. He did (like many other thinkers of the time) sign a petition defending someone who didn't deserve it, but it's easy to judge in retrospect as the precise context of the case was not publicly known at the time of the petition. But nowhere could i read him arguing for pedophilia or suggesting he himself engaged in such abhorrent behavior.
Thank you gammarator, you are correct, that is how it initiated. I believe what I'm recalling, and I apologize for not remembering specifics as clearly, was a couple different events after CHAZ was...let's say "established". I believe there was more than one armed stand off, one in particular a organized force (but was it national guard or city police?) and the mayor (in my previous comment referred to as "the city") directed officers to yield the area. The occupiers formed an armed militia and the city ceded control of the block to them. I unfortunately misremembered the timeline and characterized it by stating it the way that I did. Thanks for pointing that out.
Sure but that was in a very liberal city. The USA is a very large country with a full spectrum of reactions. If they would have tried that in say a large city in Texas or Montana the state police would have busted it up within a couple days.
In fairness BLM was far more violent. Neighborhoods were burned to the ground, businesses were looted, people were injured, and several people were killed. Moreover, the BLM protests involved millions of people, so 14K arrests seems believable. Moreover, how many of the arrested were charged (getting arrested on its own isn’t that big of a deal).
Various parts of Kenosha off the top of my head. Most other arson cases were isolated businesses, police precincts, etc. There were also entire neighborhoods in which virtually every business was looted. We had at least a few such neighborhoods in Chicago, and there were many others across the country including many of the communities that BLM folks purport to care about.
It seems like BLM is the new Godwin's Law of protesting. This is like inappropriately invoking the Holocaust.
BLM arose from several extrajudicial murders by police after a history of racism and mistreatment by the state. The trucker protest is essentially about commerce policy in an already very heavily regulated industry. It's hard to imagine other similar jobs where mandating your hours of sleep is discussed by a federal legislature (possibly international treaty too?).
The perspective is important because these are obviously not the same thing.
What’s the distribution? What are the median and 95th percentile donations? It’s impossible to tell if those donations are indicative of anything or merely outliers.
We have a word for "blocking infrastructure" as a form of protest: civil disobedience.
I'm sympathetic to (some) of the aims of the protesters but I think they've made their point and should go home. Still, this move by Trudeau seems like an overreaction considering there's been little/no violence.
One thing I've never understood about protests of the "you've made your point" variety is what they're supposed to do. I'm thinking of the Women's March and things like that, where there's a scheduled day and people walk around and then they are done. What is that supposed to do? It's less of a protest and more of a parade in my opinion.
The trucker protest, on the other hand, I can understand what it is supposed to do. Make people uncomfortable, block critical infrastructure, force the government to do what you want. But, if truckers just leave, then we're back to "What's the point of this?"
One thing they do is raise the bar for "public interest" scales used in legal matters. For example, protests make it more difficult for a government agency to claim information retrieval is "unduly burdensome" when compared against the public's interest. That reinforces the capabilities of journalism and so their message is more easily consumed by a wider public. In theory, anyway.
A protest is a sign of disagreement, and a signal for change... not a "We are a small, non-representative but loud group. Now give us what we want."
If the point of a protect is go 'get your way', it's essentially a crappy "Might makes right" play. Might as well not vote, ignore all the rules etc. Society doesn't work if you pick-and-choose at scale.
Civil rights protests against segregation, for example, would see protesters filling up or blocking restaurants that would refuse to serve black customers. Basically - you won't serve black people, we will put you out of business. Sometimes the police would come and arrest people, and that would win sympathy for the protesters, because even people who thought "Maybe black people shouldn't eat be allowed to eat at restaurants" might feel pangs of sympathy at seeing people arrested for just sitting at a restaurant counter.
Now, you can say "The trucker protest isn't as important as civil rights" but that's just a "You shouldn't be protesting" argument. Racists thought civil rights protesters shouldn't be protesting too. If the protesters believe their cause is actually important then it makes sense to protest. But, it only makes sense to protest in ways that are likely to result in changes. Symbols are fine, but empty symbolism isn't enough for something you think is really important.
Sure, it makes sense to protest if the issue is important and overlooked enough to pay the price of cracked skulls and prison sentences to raise awareness. Civil rights seems like it fit the bill - I grew up later but at least with my modern sensibilities I'd have happily gone up against the police for that cause. The right to skip just another vaccination (probably the sixth or seventh that you've been forced to take in your life) without losing your job doesn't seem comparable to me, but if people want to make this their hill to die on, sure...
Oh that’s right because you can’t get or transmit COVID if you’re vaccinated…
For most of us COVID is like a cold or at worse a flu if not vaccinated, and likely absolutely nothing if you are vaccinated. So the need to force people to get vaccinated is pointless because they’re only harming themselves, but it’s their own damn choice.
I doubt that one can make a universal case for a whole class of actions that always works. If you block critical infrastructure to 'have your way' because of a luxury position you're not trying to 'fix an institutional problem', you're being a dick to everyone around you while they can't fix anything for you anyway.
Imagine someone honking their horn at your bedroom window all night because they wanted a McFlurry but "the machine was broken".
If all a protest does is mess with society, it'll just end up with counter-protests and civil war light edition.
Exactly and the vast majority of people were racists at the time who I am sure did not agree with the protests.
Something has gone wrong though with this trucker protest because people should have already been arrested. LBJ wasn't granting himself power to deal with civil rights protests.
IMO now it is going to turn into some kind of Canadian Reichstag fire.
Some headline like 2/3rds of Canadians want the government to make sure there is never another Reichstag fire is just a matter of time.
Civil disobedience as I support it is a non-violent action. A lot of people cite these protestors as "non-violent" but there have been many incidences of protestors attacking or intimidating residents as well as intimidating the police to resist enforcement actions so I don't regard the current occupation in Ottawa as meeting that threshold.
I think that anyone following closely would have to concede that police conduct and the lack of enforcement is a product of the threat of violence, but I certainly concede that it might be the case that immediate enforcement /might/ result in nonviolent resolution - it just seems very unlikely.
I'm not following these protests closely, but aren't you going to have a minority of violent people in any protest? That's just the nature of argry, large groups.
If that's your bar for "violent protest", then it's trivial for anyone to disrupt any protest by injecting interlopers to try to trigger an explosion. There's evidence that undercover police tried to instigate violence and looting in the BLM protests. Couldn't that be happening here too?
I agree that in any large group there can and will be agitators, but given the dug-in nature of the Ottawa protest it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the lack of enforcement, the relatively small number of participants, and the intimidation that has occurred (as testified to by the OPS).
I think it is lost on most people not following closely that the day-to-day protest headcount is quite low, easily under 1,000 people, probably well under 500. Any normal crowd control policing unit could disperse such a small group, the police do not do so despite many instances of having done so and clear legal authority to do so.
The funny thing about the occupation of Ottawa is that it is very small! There have been many protests on parliment hill itself with ten times the headcount without incident.
I missed a qualifier about the length. That protest appears to be a day. Most day rallies have no issues. It starts to have issues when they start to be a week or more.
I would also note that some in this thread are claiming shutting down streets are violence. That protest shut down multiple streets.
Can you offer an example of a protest you would consider comparable?
Obviously shutting down streets for hours or a day is not "violence" but preventing people from enjoying public roadways for 17+ days in their own neighbourhood is a violation of their liberities. Just the same a single day horn-honking protest would not be the same as weeks unending.
But language-lawyering about the word "violence" isn't really the point anyway, this is more about the right to protest being in tension with the rights of nearby residents and workers to live peacefully.
As far as I know every protest that was a week or longer had some sort of real violence (not just road closures) so you can probably just choose any protest and compare it. I am not very familiar with Canadian protests, but Occupy and BLM are the biggest examples of large multi day protests that I can think of and both had some level of violence.
At what point does shutting down a street go too far? 1 day, 2 days, a week? It seems somewhat arbitrary to me, and that is what I was trying to convey. I think any obstruction of a road is an inconvenience. Does that mean it is too much of a tension and is causing me to not be able to live peacefully? I don't think so.
I would also say that the point of the protest is to inconvenience people. If the truckers blocked roads in the middle of the Yukon nobody would care. The reason they are doing it in Ottawa is because it is capital and because it is populated.
I guess I wouldn't have as much of an issue if there was a clear standard, but as far as I can tell there isn't.
I think that we can rely on the courts to assess the situation and make an assessment, you can't codify into law the exact criteria. There are always tensions between rights, some combination of the laws, the courts, and the compliance and tolerance of the public has to settle on a decision on a case-by-case basis.
I think OWS is a good example, they got a lot of publicity and staged long term protests and demonstrations that indeed inconvenienced people, in a two month occupation there certainly was some disruption but I would invite you to compare the two events closely and I think you will see that this Ottawa situation is quite different both in the level of disruption and the quantity of arrests.
Of course in Canada we have lots of great examples of roads being blocked in isolated areas because of logging and pipeline protests, they draw a lot of the comparisons because despite their impact being very limited in terms of the people effected they are cleared out much more violently than has occurred in any instance here. Fairy Creek is something you can look into, the RCMP happily arrested journalists covering the protest crackdown in a gross violation of civil liberties and the rule of law.
I think if your impression of the protests in Ottawa is that they have simply "shut down a street" you should look into it in more detail. (For example the mayor tried to negotiate a deal to get the trucks to stop overnighting and honking in residential areas but failed to get it to stick, that's not related to blocking off one street downtown.) I know a few people that have been hassled on the street in a manner that resulting in them regarding the area unsafe and not a public space for them anymore.
As usual, the devil is in the details. I would agree that the bridge is critical, and that forceful removal was justified. I’m less convinced that Wellington St. is critical, and I would be concerned that only the broadest brushes will be used to determine which accounts will be frozen and why.
It's not just Wellington St, it's Ottawa from the Canal to Bronson, and Somerset to Welligton. On the weekend it's extended all the way up Bank St. A giant no-go zone where businesses and pedestrians aren't safe.
I am not a north American so I just catch glimpses of what is happening in articles that pop up like this. So I am not taking sides here. Just making an observation about protests in general.
With that being said, how do you get noticed? I remember there was a Wall Street protest of some kind right after the crash. They sat quietly in parks and protested because people got annoyed when they were "inconvenienced" when they protested outside buildings. Their protests fizzled out and was forgotten. Even though large swathes of people were pissed off with Wall Street.
Back in college, we had a protest. Few people from the media were there and we were protesting on campus, doing it "right". The media people were like "go do something...we cannot cover a bunch of college kids sitting around!"
Unfortunately protests(the ones you agree with and the ones your disagree with) run by smaller groups are going to get noticed only when they do "illegal" things.
Nobody is owed attention - most small protests that stay legal are ignored because nobody gives a damn about the causes. Which is fine, we don't as a society have any obligation to pay attention to every fringe thing if it doesn't rise to the level where the legal system is activated and lawsuits or prosecutions are on the table.
Doing illegal stuff to get attention only makes me less supportive of any cause, personally, whether it's lefty or righty bullshit - I don't like this, I didn't like the Jan 6 riots, and I don't like a lot of what I saw from BLM, Occupy Wall Street, and many others over the years. Even if I agreed with a few of the underlying demands or issues (I'm against vax mandates, I do think Derek Chauvin should be in prison, there was a ton of bank fraud in the 00s and high level people should have been jailed, etc).
So if you agree with the cause (whichever it is) but disagree with the methods, what should we do? Parading down the streets once a year with signs never did anything for people's rights. Only through massive organized struggles and sabotage actions have workers, women, colonized peoples (etc) ever obtained something.
We quickly forget that many civil rights protests were illegal, or at least, highly disruptive to the normal function of society, as were the BLM protests.
Occupy Wall Street did not do a lot of shutdowns, they quickly migrated marches to sidewalks and sit downs to public spaces to the consternation of nypd.
The reason they fizzled is they had absolutely zero marketing experience. When they finally got down to listing their demands, it was a 43 point manifesto from save the penquins to truther investigations.
BLM really didn’t get anywhere (they initially had a ~14 point demands) until someone came up with “Defund!”. Marketers would get you down to 2 or 3 items, but two syllables was brilliant.
The reason Occupy failed is not because of marketing, it's because they were not organized to face the raw powers of the State protecting Wall Street moguls. By peacefully demonstrating on sidewalks, you're not having any meaningful impact and you're not being heard.
Someone in this thread mentioned "civil disobedience" movements. Studying the history of such movements (anti-apartheid politics, workers movements, womens rights, anti-colonial struggles), we quickly realize although having a mass of non-violent protesters (popular support) is important, the actual balance of power lies with more militant groups putting actual pressure (sabotage, blockages, attacks) on our overlords to change things for the better.
This is revisionist. They could not sustain a united front, it quickly deteriorated and was diffused with people supporting various agendas. It was important for the message to reach people in order to ramp up support and for the movement to sustain itself, that was a colossal failure.
> was diffused with people supporting various agendas
That sounds pretty healthy. I mean, having a central authority deciding for everyone else is precisely what's wrong with our society.
It also doesn't help to keep a unified front when you have many people injured/traumatized/incarcerated due to police actions (political repression). So while i agree the Occupy movement was a colossal failure, i don't agree with your interpretation of why.
If a large movement doesn't converge on a common purpose, it falls apart, simple as that. There is no need for a "central authority", just message discipline. People may have different gripes and ideas, that doesn't matter - they ought to be able to agree on some things to make that work. Effective labor movements have pretty clear purposes.
> Effective labor movements have pretty clear purposes.
I don't think that is true. I've personally witnessed several major movements in France which involved literally millions of people on the streets, some of which were successful and some not. Let's look over the past 20 years:
- the anti-CPE movement (CPE was a reform for quasi-slave labor for people fresh out of studies) won after months of intense and violent struggle (think molotov cocktails) and university occupations
- the national suburbs riots of 2005 (caused by cops murdering two kids, and Sarkozy raging racist discourse) failed after weeks of intense and violent struggle ; nothing changed except some people were jailed
- in 2010-2011, the protests against retirement reform gathered over a million people every week and the government was on the verge of collapse (we no longer has gas in the petrol stations) yet the movement was never very violent, the government never ceded and so the movement lost
- in 2016, millions of people demonstrated and blockaded for months against working law reform, yet Macron (at the time "socialist" minister of economy) passed it without a vote (article 49-3 of the constitution allows the government to bypass the parliament, and it had not been used in decades) ; this was the first mass movement after the State of emergency (2015) and we can see the fascist cops were on free wheels as we started getting serious life-threatening injuries at every demo even in smaller cities
- in 2018, with the gilets jaunes, despite approval by a vast majority of the population and the protests spreading to even the tiniest countryside cities for over a year and half, the movement failed as it was teargased/grenaded/batoned to hospital (or to death, as with Zineb Redouane) and MANY people were either jailed for extensive periods of time or crippled for life
All of these protests i've noted had very clear objectives and were very massive. Some succeeded, some not. What's the difference between those cases? The only difference is the decisions by the government and the amount of blood they were willing to spill. If you want to know what kind of blood spilling i'm talking about, there's a gilets jaunes collection here: TRIGGER WARNING http://lemurjaune.fr/
On the other hand, studying the history of political repression gives us much clearer ideas on how/why social movements can succeed or fail. The fact that INTERPOL started with a "international police conference on the peril of anarchism" for example, or early collaboration between french/russian/american services to hunt down radical troublemakers. Or the Church committee investigation about FBI's COINTELPRO. Or in France, the many post-WWII scandals involving pro-nazi police prefects (like Maurice Papon who ordered to kill and deports hundreds-to-thousands of algerians in a single week of october 1961). Or the fascist militias organized by De Gaulle (Services d'Action Civique) to attack May 68 demos. Or... and the list goes on.
Modern States have spend considerable resources on counter-insurgency strategies because that's how they hold power. Whether opposition movements have a common purpose is irrelevant as long as the State has the powers and is willing to cripple or kill a significant portion of the demonstrators should their organizing start to be effective.
Disclaimer: i was not in NY and have never resided in NY.
> The masters of Wall Street didn’t have to lift a finger.
No, because they had their obedient militia (the police) teargas, beat up and arrest everyone for them. And the media to spew lies along the lines of "we don't know what these people want" because their desires can't be confined in a single bill/reform.
These people wanted what Barack Obama promised and denied them: hope and change. Food & housing & healthcare for free for all. Putting an end to racial policing. Etc. They were met with rubber bullets and detention. And now clueless people like you who were not on the ground (i personally was involved with other Occupy movements in Europe at the same time) now judge them based on State/corporate propaganda.
That's pretty representative of any form of collective organizing defying the status quo. The civil rights activists of the 60s in the USA were equally derided by the media and repressed by the police in their day, just like the gilets jaunes of today's France.
> Best of luck with projection and raging about conspiracies on the internets.
You've mentioned "conspiracy theory" twice now. What's a conspiracy theory about what i said? Are you implying police/political repression does not exist and we all live in a free and democratic society? Or something else entirely?
The adjective critical though has been used very broadly during the pandemic. It's clear that it needs a very specific definition or such language could be used to make any protest illegal because it blocked access to a pizza place, etc.
> The adjective critical though has been used very broadly
Access to most of Ottawa was been cut off, including one of the biggest border crossings in Canada, not a "pizza place". Deploying hyperbole like this isn't helping your case. Surely if the Ambassador Bridge doesn't qualify as critical infrastructure, nothing does.
There are a couple of rather large exaggerations in your post.
It wasn't the "entire CN rail network" (instead it was the Eastern Canada segment, comprising maybe 15% of CN's network). They don't claim that rail carries three times more than trucks do, but instead simply note that one rail car carries as much as three trucks.
And the blockade lasted approximately 2-3 weeks. Not sure what you mean by "after almost a year".
But let's be clear -- most of Canada was enraged about that. It was hugely expensive to Trudeau politically, and was a tenterhooks [edit - thank you fennec] situation because of the aboriginal file. Yet most of Canada absolutely wanted a stronger response and it hurt Trudeau in the election.
I honestly don't get these "but the rail blockade" or "but some BLM protest in some US city" responses.
>It was hugely expensive to Trudeau politically, and was a tenterhooks [edit - thank you fennec] situation because of the aboriginal file. Yet most of Canada absolutely wanted a stronger response and it hurt Trudeau in the election.
So as long as it's politically expedient for the sitting PM you would advocate using the emergencies act? Yikes.
> So as long as it's politically expedient for the sitting PM you would advocate using the emergencies act? Yikes.
Can you point to the part of my post that said that? Anywhere?
Yikes.
Stronger response simply means demanding that police enforce existing laws and injunctions (where injunctions are often simply court orders saying "follow the law") instead of the conciliatory let-it-play-out messaging that Trudeau used at the time. Even in the case of the current protests the emergency act seems unnecessary, and is basically a failure condition for the Ottawa Police basically doing nothing and claiming that they're all out of ideas.
I'm not saying what is currently being obstructed is wrong (or not) to include in a restriction on protest.
I am saying that during the pandemic for the purposes of restrictions and exceptions, people who worked at grocery stores were "critical workers". It's a big old caution for using words like "critical" which are very vague in order to implement policy assuming it will be used for things you deem to be important, because you do things like that and now there's precedent. Grocery stores are critical infrastructure now so some picket line for a labor dispute at a grocery store is now legally arguably a banned protest.
When opposed to things, people are usually very happy to give away freedoms they don't realize might have adverse consequences in the future.
> In accordance with this order, the State Public Health Officer has designated the following list of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers to help state, local, tribal, and industry partners as they work to protect communities, while ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.
and pointing out that there are an enormous number of things which were labeled critical infrastructure during the pandemic, like any store that sells food.
You’re splitting hairs in an unhelpful way which distracts from the point entirely.
I think the stores are critical infrastructure for food but that individual staff issues is not so critical, and more on the lines of essential.
However, enough grocery stores have to be kept running, or else people could run out of food, or the food supply chain could be disrupted.
So, "essential workers" means that they have to be protected and encouraged to work as a group, but that if some individual ones quit or have to take time off work, it will be OK. Whereas in this crisis, if even one grocery store closed, that could, depending on the area, cause a problem.
A "protest" that prevents people from crossing a border or shuts down a city isn't a protest. It is hostage-taking.
The US First amendment has some good language on this: the people have a right to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Imposing a blockade does not qualify. If they just sit in front of Parliament and hold up signs and shout, but don't impede anyone going about their business, then they have a right to make their voices heard.
But what about (some other protest)? Civil rights protesters are usually ordered to disperse after a short time and get arrested if they don't. Sometimes they engage in civil disobedience, but they can be arrested if they do that.
The trick is to categorize protestors as "domestic terroists", despite having not done any extreme violent actions, as the Canadian government seems to be doing here.
The govt didn't coin that, the public did, by virtue that protesters are terrorizing the residents. Harassment, 100+db horns at night, vandalization, etc.
A common misconception is that anyone who terrorises someone is a terrorist. It's an understandable mistake but it's wrong. Terrorism has quite a specific definition.
Emergency powers weren't invoked in 2020 when Canada's railways were blocked for months. In fact, at the time Trudeau was quoted saying things like "Politicians should not be telling the police how to deal with protesters"
The double standards in this country are staggering at times.
Locking bank accounts at all WITHOUT A TRIAL, seems dystopian. That's a lot of power for the state to have to be able to reach into some ones bank accounts with no due process.
Edit: changed AT ALL to without a trial because on second thought resized it's possible that there are some legit uses for freezing bank accounts.
I agree. I have no idea how Canada's legal system works but I would not trust the american executive branch with this power without the authorization of a judge. Even then it feels too easily abused, but you can already do a lot worse with a judge's sign off and there are certainly cases where the power makes sense.
Here is a quote from Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland:
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
—-
Under Canadian law, the Liberal government has to put this before both the House of Commons and Senate within 7 days.
Just to clarify, under Canadian law the government has to put the use of the Emergencies Act before the House and Senate withing 7 days. It doesn't matter what colour the government is. The law itself was passed by a Progressive Conservative government to whom it would have applied exactly the same way.
Say what? Those two are literally polar opposites. I guess they can be progressive on the social scale and conservative on the economic one, but there's got to be a better name for that.
So Canada used to have a party called the Conservative Party (they do now too again). They wanted a guy named John Bracken who was Premier of Manitoba under the Progressive party of Manitoba to be leader. He wouldn't agree until they put Progressive in their name. So they did and Conservative Party became the Progressive Conservative Party until they merged with the Reform Party and went back to being called the Conservative Party. Some provinces still have a PC party.
Here and now is a different place and time than when that political party was named during the merger of the Progressives and the Conservatives in an effort to defeat the incumbent Liberals. Being a "liberal" was a term for a supporter of the right-wing moneyed establishment at the time because of their demand for laissez-faire economics and reciprocity in international trade. A lot can change over a century.
Yes, of course it is. I replied to someone who said they have no idea how Canadian law worked. Commons/Senate approval is part of the Emergency Act and the current government has to follow it.
Yes. Trudeau's father did the same thing (look up "Just watch me"). Anyway, there's no such thing as separation of powers in Canada. It's called Parliamentary Sovereignty.
I mean, Trudeau's father called in the military because a terrorist group kidnapped a government minister and set off multiple bombs. This is pretty small potatoes compared to the FLQ.
We don't have the concept of co-equal branches of government, but the judiciary can declare acts of parliament to violate the charter of rights and freedoms. The Emergencies Act explicitly says it does not supercede any constitutional rights.
There was concern of over-reach when Pierre invoke the War Measures Act also. The War Measures Act included all of Canada, not just the geography the FLQ was operating in. I was fairly young at the time but I still have a recollection of the bombing, kidnapping and murder. I can't reconcile the current protest demands with say the FLQ manifesto[0]
That's unfortunately true, however those cases are frequently reversed and returned by judges (though the burden is entirely on the asset owners to bring the case). We definitely need legislation to invert the process though, law enforcement should be going to a judge before they can seize the assets.
Seizing funds from criminals to restrict their ability to perpetrate and profit from crime is a tool used by law enforcement in essentially every country, and has been happening for a long time.
There’s plenty of areas of this that are misused (see things like civil asset forfeiture), but the overarching strategy of freezing bank accounts isn’t novel or dystopian.
Edit: it’s a bit sneaky to change “AT ALL” to “WITHOUT A TRIAL” without calling out the change.
Yeah, but in most countries there is due process in front of a judge to do that.
You can't just have the executive decide they can do that using pure administrative action to seize property. Also, you generally also have to prove in a court of law there was a crime before you can do anything at all.
The US civilian asset forfeiture (and now in Canada too, it seems) are actually quite unique in that regard outside of maybe China (not sure even you can do that there anymore), and at most couple other dystopian very authoritarian nations.
Note that this is not asset forfeiture. The order only authorizes financially institutions to temporarily freeze accounts if they suspect they’re being used to fund illegal blockades. They can temporarily freeze accounts without a court order without any fear of legal liability.
That’s it. It’s a time out, not a forfeiture. The Emergency Act is powerful, but this invocation isn’t that powerful.
My point was only that this is a temporary denial of service, not an asset forfeiture. Finally, do you have experience with Canadian banks? Temporary account suspensions are relatively common for unpaid debt. There are defined processes, federally regulated banks have a position called ombudsperson and there is always the OBSI.
Moral is, don’t ignore court orders in democratic countries.
What is according to you the legal link (or logical construction), in between an order to disperse, or not support somebody not dispersing, and a freezing of said person's assets ?
It doesn't exist in the normal course of judicial business, how does it get created here ?
I'm not an expert in this field, I just tried to correct one word. This is a freeze not a forfeiture.
My understanding is that the legal link was created by the Emergencies Act. The government believes that it will be able to calm the situation faster if they can track and cut off the flow of money. This invocation gives the government increased powers to track (they ordered crowdfunding platforms/payment processors to register with FINTRAC). And increased powers to cut off funds (through freezing bank accounts).
Edit:
Here's a relevant quote from Canada's Deputy PM:
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
> My understanding is that the legal link was created by the Emergencies Act. The government believes that it will be able to calm the situation faster if they can track and cut off the flow of money.
They created a power of themselves, out of expedience, but there still doesn't seem to be any justification or grounds for it according to the basic principles of the Canadian legal order, except it formally comes from the PM, and he has cops.
They created a false legal reality (grave danger of violence to Canada and its people), which isn't objectively observable, to justify a power to solve that false reality, where in fact they are using it for something else (forcing people to move parked trucks).
They could have just arrested all the truckers for a variety of traffic laws or public-order laws (honking, noise), and then moved the trucks one by one. Instead, Emergency powers...
As my administrative and fiscal law professor taught us, after listing for two weeks all the principles which can be used to craft a law (not Canadian law school, European) :
There's one very old legal principle left, according to which laws are sometimes made, wrongly, but well, that's the real world for you : "I'mma the state, I do it because I can, or I'mma gonna crush you".
Ah, perfect, the corporations are free to do the govt bidding without explicit pressure from the govt. They'll work hand in hand though. This feels like they are just making what GoFundMe did, legal after the fact.
Well, the big corporations and the government have always worked hand in hand. What they do under the covers when they're in bed with each other is their business.
As has now been called out by the person I replied to, when I typed my reply, they said seizing funds “at all” was dystopian. They’ve now amended the comment to specify without the involvement of the judiciary.
Locking bank accounts without a trial happens every single day in every democracy in the world. Any legal process where money is suspected of being dirty but is allowed to flow freely through the banking system until the conclusion of a trial would be completely useless - I believe this is fairly obvious if you think about it.
Due process should be quicker, I wish more people would vote based on making the courts more responsive, but unfortunately no one does.
Tyrannical means " Unjust or oppressive governmental power.", so the justification for the mandate is important, not just the fact that a mandate exists.
A mandate with a good justification is authoritarian but not tyrannical.
I recall the police responding to the protests in Portland and working hard to shut them down as a result. The Ottawa police have declined to take action.
Translation: "If it's for a Just Cause, then anything goes. If it's for a Unjust Cause, then we should arrest you at the slightest infraction of the law and punish you to the fullest extent of the law".
This is hilariously backwards. Black protestors in Ottawa are arrested all the time. These people have been paralyzing a massive part of downtown and violating the law for 3 weeks and they're finally now seeing some consequences.
Also, yes, some protests are moral and some aren't. If there's a Nazi march shutting down main street I have no objections to shutting it down. It's not logically inconsistent to say that people shitting in the streets, having drunken discos and harassing people day and night aren't really "protesting" at this point.
>This is hilariously backwards. Black protestors in Ottawa are arrested all the time.
I was making fun of the parent poster's normative theories, not describing how police in ottawa actually behave.
>These people have been paralyzing a massive part of downtown and violating the law for 3 weeks and they're finally now seeing some consequences.
I'm sure you could say the same for hong kong protesters. I'm going to go on a limb that flooding the entire island with millions of protesters is pretty "paralyzing", if not more.
>Also, yes, some protests are moral and some aren't. If there's a Nazi march shutting down main street I have no objections to shutting it down.
Sounds like you're agreeing with my previous comment?
>It's not logically inconsistent to say that people shitting in the streets, having drunken discos and harassing people day and night aren't really "protesting" at this point.
I have family who live in an authoritarian dictatorship and there is a lot of news coverage of Trudeau's decision - why? Because they parade it around as "evidence that allowing protest is dangerous to a countries stability" and "see what hypocrites the so-called democracies are?"
And the next time farmers protest because their land is being taken away and given to multinational corporations, they crackdown and say "see? we're just like Canada, these people are criminals and we need to restore order".
Being admired by thuggish dictatorships doesn't exactly reflect well on Canada.
Justice means appropriate measures for relevant actions. Not wanting to take responsibility for your own decisions like these truckers is a far cry from being repressed and abused because you look like someone the men who control the money don't like. The tolerable level of their civil disobedience should be commensurate with the severity and legitimacy of their complaint.
So all causes are equal? Is it bad to apply informed judgement on society issues? If you go by that, then the US revolution should have been a bad and illegal thing.
>So all causes are equal? Is it bad to apply informed judgement on society issues?
Are all speech created equal? Is it bad to apply informed judgement on society issues? I mean, why do we want Bad Speech to proliferate? The government should ensure only Good Speech is allowed!
>If you go by that, then the US revolution should have been a bad and illegal thing.
"all causes are equal" =/= "all causes are a bad and illegal thing".
Or perhaps it’s because on the one hand we have a cause which seeks to protect marginalized groups, and on the other hand we have a cause which opposes the protection of marginalized groups.
1. this sounds awfully like to the "modern" definition of racism, which basically justifies any sort of action as long it's for the "marginalized" group.
2. What counts as "marginalized" here? I could plausibly make the argument that anti-vaxxers are marginalized because the government is cutting off their access to common services and threatening their livelihoods.
1. On the contrary, this is about giving everyone a fair chance. In no universe are protections for marginalized groups "racism". I would strongly encourage you to read about John Rawl's "veil of ignorance" concept. [1]
2. Pretty much 1:1 correspondence with the social determinants of health. [2]
>1. On the contrary, this is about giving everyone a fair chance. In no universe are protections for marginalized groups "racism".
this is exactly my point. back in the day "racism" really did mean "treating people differently based on race". https://web.archive.org/web/20071014174747/https://www.merri.... under that definition, "giving everybody a fair chance" or "protections for marginalized groups" could count as racism in certain cases. eg. "this scholarship is for black students only", or "you can't apply for this scholarship if you're asian or jewish".
>2. Pretty much 1:1 correspondence with the social determinants of health.[1]
So going off that list:
1. if you're a rich person protesting then that's bad because you're not marginalized
2. if you're employed and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
3. if you're well educated and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
4. if you haven't suffered childhood trauma and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
5. if you didn't grow up on the wrong side of the tracks and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
6. if you have social support and coping skills and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
7. if you have a healthy diet and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
8. if you have "access to health services" (live near a hospital and can easily take time off work?) and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
9. if you have better than average genes and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized.
10, 11, 12. if you're [redacted] and you're protesting, that's bad because you're not marginalized
If we're talking about truckers, we can definitely check off #3, and probably check off 1, 5, 7, and 8 as well. Does that check enough boxes to earn them "marginalized" status?
So protests are only just if they are against the 14 things listed by the government? I thought "free speech zones" were ridiculous, but this idea of approved protest topics takes the cake.
>and about how they do it
What does "marginalized groups" have to do with "how they do it"? Are you saying that if you're protesting against the 14 approved protest topics, you get additional leeway regarding illegal things to do?
If people blockade an important international crossing or trying to deny access to government buildings I expect that the authorities will promptly clear it, even if they are doing it in the name of a cause I support.
Yes, BLM sometimes blocked roads. In every case they were promptly removed if they did not disperse when ordered to.
2 women were killed in Seattle when BLM and police shutdown a highway for a protest: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/police-2-women-hit-by-car-on-clo...
>Protesters had shut down the interstate for 19 days in a row, Mead said at a press conference. The State Patrol responded by closing sections of the interstate to keep drivers and protesters safe.
Okay? There was talk about a law in the US that didn't get exercised. Facts and weasel words acknowledged. So what? I really don't understand why people insist on re-litigating the BLM riots, focused on what the American government did or did not do. This is a story about protests going down in Canada, and how the Canadian government is responding to them. The only connection is the huge infusion of American money into this Canadian protest, but instead, folks are doing whataboutism donuts on BLM's lawn. It doesn't apply here. Why are people doing this.
I agree with this and I generally support their cause. But you don’t have the right to shut down commerce and affect citizens ability to move across a border. IMO they have let this go on far too long.
What I am pointing out is that it’s weird to protest Canada for having policies that limit the employment of unvaccinated truckers when it’s the Americans who had the vaccine mandates first.
And watch you’ll see mandates dropping in states where midterm elections are coming up for folks, cuz the mandates are stupid and people pretend to like them to impress the other people pretending to like them, but nearly everyone just wants to leave clown world.
Canada was already on track to open up. It follows Europe. People are already quipping about protestors wanting to take credit by likening it to protesting the darkness at midnight and claiming victory at 6 am.
I too don't believe that the protests should get all the credit.
But its not Gov following science, at best it's Gov following sentiment. People are right fed up of the overreach and want no more rules around masks, passports and lockdowns. There's no more tolerating restrictions for something that's a minor cold, can be vaccinated against if you are worried or early treated with antiviral using both new and repurposed drugs.
The govt is following advice from scientific advisors. People don't seem to appreciate that much of the weighting for these decisions have to do with hospital capacity, and also that decisions don't shift at a drop of a hat. Your notion of following "sentiment" is complete projection rooted in discontent. It has no basis in reality, and you have fuck all to back it up.
The restrictions have already been poised to be lifted on the strength of said advice. This was already on the horizon and one can only imagine that protestors purposefully decided to move on this on the tail end of these policies.
Isn't it interesting how demonstrations contrary to the regime tend to be treated as criminal non-protests while demonstrations amenable to the regime tend to be treated as "legitimate" protests? Certainly this classification cannot be derived a priori in any other way; for example, the regime media generally treated vastly more disruptive and destructive demonstrations in 2020 as "legitimate" protests despite those demonstrations involving ex ante illegal activities like arson and theft.
Trudeau is calling the whole protest illegal. Last week they arrested an old man for merely honking his horn to show support. So, anyone attending a protest is joining an illegal activity...and can have their accounts frozen.
There's no guarantee of due process in Canada's constitution?
The whole protest has been illegal from the start (violating the highway traffic act)
> Last week they arrested an old man for merely honking his horn to show support.
Source? Either way, yes, there was an injunction granted specifically against honking horns.
> So, anyone attending a protest is joining an illegal activity...and can have their accounts frozen.
No, anyone attending this specific protest at this specific time when there is a provincial state of an emergency (and now the invoking of the federal emergencies act, which requires provincial assent) is joining an illegal activity, and anyone providing monetary support to said illegal activity may have their accounts frozen.
> There's no guarantee of due process in Canada's constitution?
There is indeed. The Emergencies Act is subject to the charter of rights and freedoms, section 7 of which covers legal rights[1] and section 1 of which lays out how these rights are subject to "such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". It'll be up to the courts to decide after the fact whether these restrictions were demonstrably justified (hint: with the province declaring the protest illegal, declaring a state of emergency last week, and the protesters totally refusing to move: they will be found justified. Our court system is not nearly as politicized as our southern neighbours')
The only thing that's sad is that a bunch of enraged people aren't getting vaccinated during an ongoing pandemic and instead decide to break the law and cause untold sums in economic damage.
Getting these people off the street isn't authoritarianism, it's preventing the inmates from running the asylum.
Getting protesters at Parliament Hill arrested, fined, bank accounts frozen, and other people who support them (fining those who brings food and gas), isn't authoritarian?
Can't you make a distinction with the bridge blockade and the rest?
I think you can and should make a distinction between protests that are lawful and those that are illegal. If a protest isn't lawful any more, aiding it isn't either.
To me the Canadian government doesn't look authoritarian, it looks weak. For weeks you have people threatening public order as well as public health. To accommodate this implies that a minority can intimidate the majority of the population and legitimate authority through use of force.
Exactly right. We should allow protests, but only the ones that don't make the government look weak. As soon as the protest starts gaining traction, it needs to be declared illegal so that the minority cannot intimidate legitimate authority.
Like the Hong Kong protests? Those are illegal. I don't think your distinction is useful or clarifying. All that being illegal says is that the state has decided its not allowed.
Then write to your selected member of parliament and complain about it, help campaigns and candidates next election who better align with your view, or run yourself!
But you might be better served to first examine the reasons why so many Canadians are in favour of various restrictions that have been introduced (and eventually once again withdrawn), by every party and every level of government in the last two years. It's mostly because we have much more faith than our American counterparts that our institutions will do what's right for all Canadians.
> Then write to your selected member of parliament and complain about it, help campaigns and candidates next election who better align with your view, or run yourself!
What about an online petition or a bake sale?
Less sarcastically: there are frequently situations in which a majority may democratically decide to make a minority behave in a certain way. I think it is relatively clear from opinion polls that a majority of Canadians do not agree with the behavior of the truckers. So writing to an MP or running for parliament will probably be a fruitless strategy. Hence the protests.
It would be trivial to find unpleasant, widely-condemned situations in which you and I would probably be united in our opposition.
The difficulty comes when the minority being forced to behave in a certain way are non-appealing in some way. Democracies need to find a way of dealing with them. It will be horse-trading, negotiation, cajoling, appealing and arguing.
None of those strategies were applied by the Trudeau government before they became hysterical and tried to claim they were having a Canadian version of Jan 6th.
I am certain that many Canadians both do not agree with the apparent demands of the truckers and simultaneously do not agree with the application of the Emergencies Act.
It looks like the old man was stopped for honking. Not sure on the timing of everything, there was an injunction granted against honking downtown Ottawa.
He appears to have been arrested for refusing to identify himself when stopped (it looks like he was intending to, then emboldened by the cameraman opted not to). That's bog standard highway traffic act stuff - if you're stopped driving, you have to show your license, registration and proof of insurance if asked.
To say "arrested for honking" feels misleading - it seems reasonable to suggest that if he followed standard Highway Traffic Act stuff he would have been on his way with a warning/ticket/whatever is done presently to stop the honking, doesn't it? I'm open to have misunderstood, I'm not even qualified to be an armchair lawyer.
This is a parody post, right? Like your claims are so absurd as to convince readers the government has overreached, yes?
> violating the highway traffic act
Show me the man, and I'll find you a crime. Seriously man, what the fuck is the "Highway Traffic Act."
> an injunction granted specifically against honking horns
Let's simply declare a benign activity that people do thousands of times per day in every city, illegal!
> this specific protest at this specific time
But also, you better not show up at similar protests at other times either
> provincial state of an emergency
Yep, the blanket "emergency declaration" that makes virtually everything we don't like, illegal
> joining an illegal activity
because we just declared whatever you are doing to be illegal
> anyone providing monetary support to said illegal activity may have their accounts frozen
so you don't have to be a protester to be engulfed by this, just offering $5 so someone can get a coffee means you could have your accounts frozen. Cast a wide net, indeed!
> It'll be up to the courts to decide after the fact
Yes, by judges who are appointed by Canada's federal government!
Arrested for refusing to identify himself. He had been blowing the horn in a residential area for quite a long time. Cops came by to tell him to knock it off, he refused to cooperate with them.
> Last week they arrested an old man for merely honking his horn to show support
Managed to hurt him too.
Imagine being in law enforcement. Coming home to your family and brag about how you physically hurt an old man and bullied him out of his constitutional rights.
