There's also plenty of wiggle room in their statement - they said they froze the accounts of "influencers" and people they "suspect" committed illegal acts. If it turns out they did in fact freeze someone who just donated, they didn't technically lie if they can fit them into one of those vague groups.
Want examples to show governments tend toward corruption? Easy. Want examples showing governments working well? Sure! Examples showing citizens exercising power? Yep. Examples showing citizens being crushed under the heel of their government? We have that too! Black people being killed by police? Sure! White people being killed by police? That happens too! How about police getting attacked by civilians? Google has you covered.
> How many more examples do we need
If you go looking for examples to support your narrative, you'll always find them. We need data and analysis. And no, the plural of anecdote isn't data.
Shouldn't we be talking about what actually happened, though, instead of buying into a false narrative that is being intentionally pushed by people with an agenda? I agree that freezing the bank account of a student in Halifax because they made a small donation to the convoy protest would be an abuse of power. But since that's not what happened, despite the fact that various people with a beef with Canada/Trudeau/liberals/etc. are claiming it did, what exactly are we debating here?
We know that, after a period of weeks and after economic losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the government has gone after the principal people organizing and financing the blockades and occupations. They have used force and arrested some of them. They have frozen the accounts of others. We can argue about whether or not those actions constitute "egregious human rights violations", because then we're arguing about actual facts and actual decisions, not strawmen.
The Canadian government isn't known to have lied over and over a thousand times over as far as I know.
Yes the government has had scandals, here's a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_i...
So I won't say they can't, but I also like OP think arguing in these hypothetical is a waste of energy.
We could argue that the process needs to be transparent, make the list public for example. In fact, maybe it is, might be one of these: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...
I also feel logically, I don't see a motivate, small donors would only be cause for political complications. Logically it would make sense for them to restrict it to the people actually blocking roads with their trucks and to big donors financing large sums of money.
If a crucial part of your argument is the epistemological claim that we obviously can't trust anyone who presents evidence or arguments that we don't like because they could be lying, then there's clearly no way of having a reasoned discussion.
As a contrasting case, if a police department arrested some people during a protest and released a statement about why, a journalist could verify that against the public records and even follow along the criminal proceedings. How can we verify claims made by the RCMP about their extrajudicial actions?
I think there might be, the banks aren't in individually being contacted, I'm pretty sure they would have been added to one of the public sanction lists here: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...
Why assume she lied until there is proof?
Let's be clear -- there is no silencing component to this act. If someone has unfairly seen their accounts frozen, do a tell-all sad tale to every media outlet you can find. Rant on twitter. Share those Facebook pages. There are plenty of outlets that would love it. There are political parties who would make this their battle cry, using it to seal their own ascension.
But there isn't a single case. Not one. No sad tales. Now accounts have been frozen -- we know that for sure -- but the people whose accounts have been frozen have been organizers and direct participants. People who knew what was coming and had literally weeks of warning to stop or face consequences. There isn't a lot of sympathy there. But the poor waitress in some small town who gave $20...boy, that story will give this country a new government.
Yet...where is it?
You've mentioned BLM multiple times. BLM protests in Canada were a momentary point event and the total sum of damage was minuscule (not the "billions" you claimed in another post). Why would the EA or SoE be called for a momentary event? One that isn't making promises about not leaving. Of "holding the line". Sorry, your own rhetoric and bombast got used against you.
A single day of the Windsor bridge blockade eclipsed that total in damages by magnitudes. As did a single day of the Ottawa insurrection. They might not have been breaking windows, but the damage was enormous. The cost to businesses, in policing, and to commerce was enormous. Now add that the convoy and its supporters were openly advocating terroristic threats against service providers that cooperate with the police (e.g. towing companies), which it should be noted is itself an incredibly serious crime, but that just got normalized.
> Or this tweet by the Ottawa Police?
Are you referring to the sadly pathetic lawyer basically police-car-chasing for clients to grift? Because you know the Ottawa Police tweet was spot on. Just as they gave plenty of warnings. And just to be clear, it is critically important that defense lawyers and civil liberty groups push the government and fight for every right, but citing this guy and his obvious grift, or his pander-to-the-crowd "but you can't do that!!!" routine, is not convincing.
As a protip, when you put dozens of links -- most of them completely unconvincing nonsense -- in your posts, it just looks crazy. It doesn't make your point.
> It's hard to hide who has been jailed
None of the “influencers” we talk about are jailed. Nor does having your money frozen mean “jail”. It sure can be really bad and not without consequences, but even fully IRL we wouldn’t describe someone having all his possessions taken as jailed.
Then govs have been freezing account under many pretenses for decades, except we now have a chance to get the affected people to come forward and explain they’re getting shafted. That wouldn’t happen a few decades ago, there was no way the local news would touch a story about some random peeps getting frozen under a terrorist charge for instance. Do you really think it’s worse now for activists than decades ago ?
1. The person made a donation to the Freedom Convoy.
2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse.
3. The person's bank account got locked due to an unrelated reason (false positive on the fraud check system).
4. The person either didn't contact the bank, or the bank was ambiguous, so they contacted their MP.
5. The MP, that is generally arguing against the right to freeze accounts [0], used it as an example to illustrate his point.
So, key takeaways:
1. The recently passed legislation makes it possible to freeze the supporters' bank accounts.
2. It has not been done so far.
3. People are on edge, expecting it to be done.
4. Making the power less broad, or putting some provisions about basic life expenses could be a good idea.
> 2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse
The Emergencies Act is not retroactive. If this was the order of operations then their account was not locked because of the EA.
https://orders-in-council.canada.ca/attachment.php?attach=41...
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-ottawa-can-do-n...
> However, Jacques said some bank account holders may still be subject to other court orders freezing their assets.
> The province of Ontario won an order on Feb. 10 that froze the distribution of funds raised through the American online funding platform, GiveSendGo. And on Feb. 17 a group of Ottawa citizens, businesses, and employees who are suing key organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy 2022 won a sweeping order to preserve their ability to recover damages.
[…]
> The emergency financial orders took effect on Feb. 15, and Jacques made clear it has no retroactive effect, so that anyone who donated to crowdfunding platforms prior to Feb. 15 should not be captured by the order, she said.
* https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ts/politics/federal/2022...
"The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts will be frozen."
https://twitter.com/ATabarrok/status/1494381498555781122
And this story was run in Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/police-be...
So I think it's not fair to dismiss this as fake news coming from "unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP" as your comment seems to do. The story came from the government's own deputy PM!
In the video, the deputy PM sounded like she was being vague, either obfuscating or because she was out of depth on the specifics. So if this statement wasn't true as-quoted (maybe she mis-spoke or wasn't precise), then that's great news.
So, maybe it is actually true that they did not share names with the banks. But I think it would be quite naive to take the latest claim at face value, after all they did make a contradictory claim previously. This is the sort of thing governments lie about and try to spin their way out of all the time. It's entirely plausible that they did share the info, did not expect the blowback they got, and are now in damage control mode trying to walk this back and pretend it didn't happen.
The article makes the point that it's is dangerous to not have some limitations on over reach in this case.
For example, in a protest, you might get physically tear gased or jailed, but it's temporary, and eventually you get due process and can be released, and your tears from tear gas will dissipate. Yet the nature of it is that police punishes you before you've been convinced in a court, so there's collateral damage, people who did nothing wrong are hit and tear gased and arrested by the police, and it's a big deal each time it happens.
Here too, there could very well be this sort of collateral, but the article worries that since it's less visible in nature, that people might not see it as a big deal, the same way that they would if they'd see police throwing tear gas, hitting people and arresting people left and right.
So it's saying, there's a possibility of overreach and collateral, but it might create less of a concern from citizens towards the government, since they won't notice the blast radius, as it is harder to notice it.
It's a good argument to some extent, even if in this case there would have been zero overreach and collateral, it is still a good argument for next time where there could be some.
1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.
2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.
The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.
This is a fundamental mistake. Just as you can't take your experiences from (let's say) IBM and assume that Google (or a startup, or a family business) operates in the same way, you can't take your experiences from the US government and assume that every other government works in the same way. As the only (mostly) democratic superpower, the US is a category of its own. It has global ambitions, and its government serves many purposes apart from the interests of its citizens. Other governments exist for other reasons and serve other purposes.
I'm not familiar with Canada. I don't know how its government operates or whether you should trust its word. However, I know that in another country, it's never "the government" that speaks but a specific agency or a specific official. Those all have known reputations and known biases. An informed person can often say with reasonable certainty whether you can take the government's word at face value.
What things you feel make people lunatics in this case?
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
He speaks in this syrupy, soothing voice that makes me think I'm listening to NPR (it's the public news radio here in the states, infamous for its sleep inducing qualities). But that NPR voice is saying incredibly misleading, demagogue-like statements that are the hallmark of authoritarian leanings. It's almost preferable if someone who sounds like Trump says he's going to implement a program to freeze bank accounts with no court review, because at least you expect it from a guy who speaks like a dictator. With Trudeau, it's like the optics of his appearance and demeanor blind a large subset of the population to what he's actually doing.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and the current governing party -- the ones who take all of the heat for every abuse -- are a minority government. They can fall at a moment's notice. Prime Minister in Canada isn't King, and instead is far less powerful than, for instance, the US president.
Yet *not a single case has been brought forward*. A couple of Conservative MPs have vaguely alluded to cases -- ones with almost no details, yet the few details that are brought up don't match any known donor lists (e.g. "Briane from Chilliwack") -- yet despite this being such an incredible hammer to take down this government, crickets.
So yes, I'll take the government's position on this.
"seal-clapping"
Ah, yes, "seal-clapping". That surely conveys the sincerity of your comment. Or we saw mass financing of public mayhem and realized that yes, this is a very real problem. It's a real problem that needs considerable solutions.
"purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years"
A "minority"? This is perverse. By this measure, every deplorable subset is a protected minority that you will pearl clutch about. Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?
Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope.
Can you quantify this? Because I've seen zero quantification of this. Do you know the numbers? I have yet to hear anyone with your point of view point to a single specific number. Just hand-waving about FOREIGN MONEY that MIGHT BE FROM RUSSIA and TRUMPERS! Never is a single percentage mentioned in this regard. If it was remotely significant, mentioning the quantity would bolster the government's claim, and they would do so. They don't, which almost certainly indicates it's an insignificant amount.
"Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope" Here in the US in the summer of 2020, we had entire city blocks burned to the ground, multiple police stations burned, a Federal courthouse besieged by suburban white kid radicals in Portland, a church set on fire across the street from the White House, had armed radicals occupy a neighborhood and police station in Seattle (mostly peaceful, but there were a few dozen incidents of minor violence and then a couple of murders towards the end) for months. The bad actors setting fires and perpetrating violence were a minority of the protesters. Most were simply exercising their first amendment rights. At no point did anyone freeze bank accounts, despite massive outpourings of donations from individuals for things like food, and more nefarious things like bailing out jailed rioters. It was a GOOD thing that nobody had their accounts frozen. It was immoral and wrong to allow a small number of bad actors to be used to delegitimize the entire movement. Therefore, the US government didn't do anything to rob these protesters of their rights to protest. And at no point, not for a single second, was the news media rooting for the police over the protesters. Certainly not the mainstream news in the US that has the vast majority of the mindshare. Not NPR, not CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC/NYT/etc.
By contrast, the truckers have been entirely peaceful. In a world where every human has a video camera in their pocket, there are no viral videos of violence perpetrated by the protesters. No viral videos of protesters hurling racist epithets. Instead, 2 videos showing lone actors carrying hateful flags (Confederate flag in Canada???? Really?) A few statues got vandalized in minor ways, but they got far more coverage than statues of Lincoln in the US did when they were vandalized and toppled by rioters.
"Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?": So the truckers are Nazis? One person was photographed with a Swastika flag, and they are all Nazis? Do you apply the same judgement when you see protests in line with your laptop-class fashions carrying hammer/sickle flags? Or left-flavored anti-semitic flags, which always pop up in the fringes of fashionable left-wing protests?
It's blatantly obvious you have dehumanized all of these people based on propaganda and political bias. We all know why this is:
The truckers are part of a highly unfashionable political movement. And amongst the laptop class, fashion is king. If you dissent from the government in a manner that is fashionable to the elite class, you are a hero. Fringe elements who perpetrate violence are depicted as not representative of the movement. Maximum sympathy is provided. But unfashionable? Suddenly, a single incident of violence doesn't deserve the label "mostly peaceful", you get zero sympathy, and the media is aggressively cheering on the removal of your rights. You get labelled "deplorable" (that's the word you just used above) which is subjective and revealing of dehumanization.
I'm a lifelong liberal, I've never even voted Republican. I always hated the censorious, rabidly illiberal echo chamber of the GOP that was created by them allowing themselves to be taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The constant judgement, the constant othering and dehumanization of political opponents. Today, the center left parties in Europe/Canada/US are all on this train. I'm reminded of the old Black Panther Party quote: "Scratch a liberal, and you'll find a fascist."
I will not be voting Democrat in November, and look forward to ending all support for the party until they stop championing aggressive violations of civil liberties and government/corporate allied censorship. I say this as a person who has spent cumulative weeks volunteering for campaigns, including writing software for the Obama 2012 campaign as well as the 2014 midterms in Florida, where I did 5 figures worth of free labor for targeting applications for minority registration drives. I'm done, and people with your illiberal belief system inhabiting the center left is why. I'd rather vote for dumb rednecks who treat me like an adult than folks like Trudeau who think that an NPR-like soothing voice can cloak the authoritarian, paternalistic inclinations of their actual words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you have a long history of breaking the rules here and we've had to warn you many times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390797 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052599 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052375 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348969 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513080 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512934 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207243 (May 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18250891 (Oct 2018)
If you keep this up we're going to end up having to ban you, especially because you appear to be using HN primarily for this. That's a clear abuse of the site, so please stop.
I get the sense that whenever I'm in any thread where many others are making similar, political comments, somebody gets upset and flags mine and I'm the one punished. The parent comments are all political. So what is the line between flame bait and commenting on politics?
The most recent occurrence listed was me stating to someone they were suffering from cognitive dissonance in June. If you actually look at that comment, it's not exactly a brutal insult.
I think you do a great job moderating and I don't envy the task. I just feel like there are certain kinds of users who flag everyone that disagrees with them and gives me the impression that political comments that do not go against certain dominant ideologies never get flagged but mine do.
My recommendation is that if HN does not want political discussion on the site, they shouldn't allow political links to be posted. My comments were directly related to the digital jail article's contents. I don't really see how any conversation around a government freezing people's bank accounts as a form of digital punishment cannot be political.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679
If you take a look at those and still have questions that haven't been answered, let me know and I'll be happy to try filling in the gaps.
You think the war measures act like the Emergencies Act is "democracy"?
Blacks, indigenous and hispanics have the lowest rates of vaccination in both Canada and US. If you think they are all "attempting an insurrection with daily QAnon rallies", you are living in alternate universe. I was there at the protest for 3 weekends and many of the people I met were vaxxed but opposed mandates. My buddy I was there with was also vaxxed but he took it because of coercion from the federal government because he works for them. There were nurses who took care of COVID patients for 2 years, gained natural immunity from infection and then were fired for not taking an unnecessary shot. There was even a vaxxed lady whose grandmother is 108 years old, had been given 4 shots and yet the nursing home isn't allowing them to meet in person due to COVID. These aren't political points which you are trying to make.
The second part of your comment tells me you aren't able to have a civil dialogue without ad-hominem attacks. Please read HN's guidelines before making such comments:
You seem to be profoundly misinformed.
> When BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses
BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses in Canada? Wow, I guess I must have missed that news cycle.
The "whatabout BLM" tactic is so tired.
> I don't know why you care about skin color so much
Right.
> No clue what Qanon has anything to do with vax mandates
You know, I asked myself the same question. I wondered "why does the stage in Ottawa keep talking about WEF, the Rothschilds, poisons in children's cereals, child sex rings, Donald Trump, 5G, the conspiracy that all of the media is lying to you and some guy grifting off your cause is telling you the truth, etc". Why did so many participants keep talking about so many things but vaccine mandates. Why is the entire ecosystem, and so many supporters and supplicants of this movement so caught up in QAnon nonsense among other conspiracies? Glad you share the confusion.
> You are basically spouting corporate media nonsense
Here it is. I literally stated what I directly observed, and have heard (from people like you), and you wave it off as "corporate media". Did you perhaps spit at CBC reporters while you were busy honk honking?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been posting about nothing else for literally weeks now. That's seriously uncool, and we've had to ask you more than once before not to do this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29181106 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27168859 (May 2021)
Worse than that, it appears that you've abused HN badly with many previous accounts and been banned many times in the past.
All that put together is so egregious that I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
This is beyond parody. It's as if your moderation is purpose driven to elevate and amplify disinformation, and that actually useful, meaningful discussion has disappeared from this site.
Congratulations, HN continues its descent to utter irrelevance. Now featuring literally daily QAnon nonsense, which you never moderate or threaten bans about (even after the few reasonable users try to flag and moderate). It's incredible that every one of my comments, in response to grossly ignorant nonsense, were highly upvoted by users. Then along comes dang, enabler of alt-right QAnon horseshit. Cheers.
>If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.
Can you understand now why people may be concerned about the scope of who is being targeted, regardless of what the RCMP claims they're doing? A high ranking official made it clear that donators are under the microscope based on their political affiliations.
0. https://twitter.com/RebelNewsOnline/status/14941153331368673...
Subsequent statements and clarifications have made it clear that these donors were not subject to any action, this freaking government.. they just can't quite figure out how to make a clear statement about anything, despite seeming like they are constantly reading talking points - it drives me up the wall.
Canadians donate to US protests all the time and vice versa.
Plus, the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans...
So what exactly is his point?
It probably is true, but it still is not a fact until it was verified, which is not trivial.
Those are very different statements, and they can both note have provided a list specifically of donors, while including donors on a list of "suspected criminals whom accounts need to be frozen"
Facts do matter, and I do not trust the RCMP, nor the Canadian government to provide those facts
As stated elsewhere, this is a minority government. If there is a single actual case of someone donating some small amount and having their account frozen, with the corresponding life mayhem, may the Conservatives use it to bludgeon the Liberals.
But there hasn't been one. Not a single case. A couple of opposing politicians and twitter personalities have invented vague claims of cases, but these are clearly a fiction (or have been clarified as "but it could happen" scenarios).
They don't need to. The list is public. Banks have been given the power already.
Also, trusting anything the RCMP says is like trusting what the CIA/NSA/FBI says.
No individual protestors accounts have been frozen. If you donated to this cause you literally have no idea where your money went. If you participated in the protest and feel entitled to these funds, how would you get them? Freezing the accounts, at this time, is neither pro-protest or anti-protest. The government isn't seizing this money -- it's keeping it from being moved until somebody can figure out who even owns it.
https://financialpost.com/fp-finance/banking/trudeau-gives-b...
This is the first time I've seen someone make this completely true point about the banking system.
It's not right or just, but money in the bank is not your money. It is your bank's money, and they may or may not allow you to transact it at any given time. Your recourse's are few and extremely expensive.
If anything positive comes out of this, I hope it's more folks realize this.
It is a highly regulated sector, there is frequent reporting and quick reviews. In the specific case of the GoFundMe money TD Bank was immediately at the courts begging for someone to tell them what to do.
> Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power.
However:
> The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the Emergencies Act to help authorities deal with convoy protests do not affect donors to the protests, despite unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP that a constituent had her bank account frozen over a $50 contribution.
> “At no time, did we provide a list of donors to Financial Institutions,” the RCMP said in a statement Monday. [1]
Facts are important!
1: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-rcmp-banks-an...