The real problem is oligopoly, not fascism or anything like that.
The government puts most of its effort into protecting friendly companies and industries from competition and even funneling taxpayer money to them.
In the case of Bell & Rogers this is billions of $ a year.
There is also a world of difference between an organized protest with a specific purpose drawing awareness to a cause and thousands of people using commercial vehicles to hold a city hostage with no purpose or agenda other than a bunch of angry people unleashing their rage on the cities populous.
- If you worked from an office, you likely spent a good chunk of the first 12-24 months of Covid working from home. After that, it was up to your employer to put into place a policy about that.
- Addendum: if you were in the federal government, you *were* required to get an initial shot plus a booster for most parts of the federal government. Failure to do so was dealt with in a few ways depending on department, but would usually result in your being placed on unpaid leave (PSAC has made it very difficult to fire someone in general, including under these circumstances).
- If you worked in the Forces, I gather you really didn't have much of a say in the matter, but militaries worldwide have strict and extensive vaccine schedules for all enlisted staff (and often officers, too).
The bodily autonomy argument holds some water, sure, to the same extent as you have the choice not to vaccinate your kid as they start going to school (but don't be surprised if they can't go, because we as a society have decided that things like polio don't deserve a repeat performance).
You were at no point prohibited from leaving the country, though you could de facto end up so because other countries likely wouldn't allow you in, at least, not without a Covid test.
If you were a Canadian citizen, you could not be legally denied entry into Canada, though because of the circumstances you may have been, at different points, required to either undergo a test or to go through a quarantine period.
These people were protesting being denied the ability to pick and choose what they do in society while unilaterally picking and choosing how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.
Frankly, this is probably best showcased by them deciding to just decide to take over the Ottawa baseball stadium (which is in a suburb and next to a highway) and use it and a few other places around downtown to store propane, gas, and other heating fluids since they decided to do this in the winter.
They were, at best, hypocrites, and massively reckless in the face of what was at the time still relatively speaking a medical unknown.
I'll also add, Re: the use of the Emergencies Act: regardless of what I think, a federal court has ruled it unconstitutional; the government has expressed interest in appealing the decision. I don't have a legal background, so I don't have a useful comment to add here.
I will say that it came after several weeks of multiple levels of police (but most notably, OPS) failing to do anything about the protests while tensions escalated, so it didn't come out of nowhere, and it wasn't the first thing the government tried.
Even at the time, despite very strong claims from on high to the contrary, it was becoming more and more clear that the only people who might benefit from the shots were those taking them (and the people selling them of course).
It’s surprising to me to still see people making the "social good" argument in 2024.
Boosters were required as frequently as they were because Covid was developing new variants faster than things we're used to (like the flu, which tends to have about one variant a year with high infection rates among humans). Naturally, many people do get flu "booster" shots annually to try and reduce the spread of what's still a deadly disease to the immunocompromised; we just don't talk about it much because flu death rates have roughly stabilized for long enough that they're not considered excessive deaths (in the actuarial sense).
Yes. Who said otherwise?
> and is an effective way of reducing the spread of viruses at scale, sometimes significantly so.
I don't follow. Doesn't herd immunity mean the herd is immune? As in, there is no transmission and the pathogen either dies or fades to the background?
Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
The strongest point in favor of the "social good" argument is that the shots reduced severity of infection, thereby reducing hospitalizations and freeing up hospital beds for random accidents. But the overflowing hospitals issue wasnt nearly as bad as it was made out to be as I understand it. And we'll probably never know for sure how many hospitalizations were caused by the shots themselves, because only lunatics think that something with vaccine in the name can harm you.
In a perfect world where everyone gets vaccinated and vaccines are 100% effective in all people against all individuals of a strain, yeah, probably. In reality, not everyone gets vaccinated, and not everyone reacts well to the vaccine, and sometimes individuals from a strain slip by, so no. Some individuals from a strain will survive, some people will catch it and get sick, and of those surviving the sickness, they'll become the breeding ground for a new mutation.
> Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
Source? The latest data shows that out of ~40 million Canadians, about 4.8 million or about 12% are reported to have tested positive for Covid at any point and been recorded as such. Globally, the figure is about 775 million out of 8 billion[0].
Among vaccinated Canadians, CCDR 2024 Vol. 50 published by the PHAC[1] shows that both despite waning immunity from the vaccines (which is partially attributable to the poor understanding of what would both be safe for humans and long-term effective against Covid) as well as the emergence of new variants both causing spikes in overall case count and associated stats (like hospital admissions and deaths), vaccinated people were measurably less likely to contract the disease and to fall severely ill if they did. This is roughly in line with your comment about vaccines reducing infection severity.
The study is a relatively quick read and I encourage you to give it a look if you have the stomach for medical statistics (which admittedly is pretty dry). The methodology is nothing special, but not problematic IMO, and the sample size and population distribution are good for a study of this scale (though there's an overrepresentation of the unvaccinated relative to the Canadian population; in this case, it likely doesn't represent an issue).
[0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases?n=c
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/canada-communicable-disease-report-ccdr/monthly-issue/2024-50/issue-1-2-january-february-2024/covid-19-outcome-trends-vaccination-status-canada.html> By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity.
Doing the math, that estimates ~70% of US blood donors over 16 had contracted actual covid by almost 2 years ago.
(https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7222a3.htm)
Are blood donors representative? I don't know. Reported and recorded positives doesn't seem at all representative of an overall infection count though, since it misses probably most minor cases of covid, which makes up most cases period.
This final cohort was studied based on records generated and collected in four three-month periods between April 2021 and September 2022 which is a good timeline.
This study seems to focus on the efficacy of older (≥65 years) people sticking to a strict vaccination schedule, which is reflected in the numbers; in that age group, vaccination-linked immunity is highest. The counterpoint to that is that younger groups aren't sticking to as strict a vaccination schedule, though best as I can tell, the study stops short of spelling that out, so that's my own conclusion.
Do you have any evidence at all of that? AFAIK, none exist.
What exists is some weak evidence the vaccine severely reduced the transmission of the virus. I've never seen any study strong enough to be proof, but then this is extremely hard to measure (either way it goes).
As regards your world of difference argument. Most of the important protests that have changed anything have involved not simple, passive attemtps to "draw awareness to a cause", but actually causing a good deal of deliberate loss of income, convenience, security and comfort. (see the suffragettes, the stonewall riots, the montgomery alabama lunch counter boycotts, chartists in 1848 etc).
The truckers, whether you agreed with them or not, were peaceful and intent on using that peaceful protest to force a change in their society. They were met with co-ordinated media defamation, the invocation of a power which should only be used in war time and the seizing of their supporters funds. Pretty much standard behavior for a Western democracy getting squeezed and needing to ditch the facade of democracy and revert to good old fashioned authoritarianism. It's never far from the surface.
1. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/csis-told-government-... 2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-rcmp-convoy-violence-1...
People complain about left-leaning protests taking over a public park - these guys took over multiple public spaces in multiple parts of the city. About a square mile in the middle of the city.
>There must be an urgent, critical and temporary situation that “seriously endangers” the lives, health and safety of Canadians, and it must be so significant as to exceed the capacity or authority of the provinces to address it.
A foreign funded group with heavy vehicles invaded and took over downtown Ottawa and international border crossings. The province wasn't interested in dispersing them.
The Emergencies Act definition wouldn't allow you to halt a coup attempt if Ontario could handle it but chose not to. At a certain point you have to analyze things and say that if the law has a massive loophole then the law was poorly drafted.
“You can’t protest, there’s a government here!” - Ottawa residents
Case in point: look what happened in Israel when the Abraham Accords were signed, Hamas decided to go for the "nuclear" option.
It is 100% inconvenience, and if there’s one thing that can not be tolerated in these times, is any sort of inconvenience.
Well that's kind of the point - protesters don't have the power to change anything based on physical inconvenience. The inconvenience is merely a PR effort because protesters don't have any more effective form of of PR - if people are famous/wealthy/powerful/etc. they have better forms of PR available.
The problem with some styles of protest is that they're asymmetrical in terms of damage. A relatively small number of people who get worked up enough can congregate in one location and indefinitely shut down the operations of a person/group/organization/government. At some point the legitimate governing body needs to enforce the functioning of society, or they'll lose the mandate to govern.
Exactly when did the left leaning protestors have their bank accounts frozen? Exactly when did the left leaning protests get broken up.
All I remember is canadas stupid government supporting the left leaning protests.
In the states I remember fancy Nancy wearing an African shawl kneeling in the capital.
This sort of stuff is too obvious not to see. Good luck.
It was left leaning and Police were quite happy to handle it with all they got. Many hundreds or thounsands of protester everyday (or nights) for over 100 days. 17 years-old students being hit with Baton, pepper spray, , tears gas, rubber bullets, flashbang etc. It was so chaotic that vladimir fucking putin even call canada to sort its shit (!!!). Since then police really has dialed it back in the protest.
I wonder why the ruling class hasn’t opposed social mousetrap identity politics protests.
It really was eye opening in many ways. The media sucking up to the gouverment, the gourverment not giving shit about what end up being a large chuck of the population, forgetting they were in a democracy. Trucker were err. Well see for yourself.
The rail protests had international implications too
So if that wasn't enough to invoke the emergency act then it's hard for me to imagine why the Truckers were
Possibly because the truckers blocked a bridge to the US, and the US didn't like that.
But the emergencies act? Freezing bank accounts?
They didn't blow up the bridge did they?
- the private banks decided to close the accounts, ostensibly acting by themselves (but probably not) and not by government order
Stuff even two years ago is lost to history
Then things get super messy when you start to look at how the province deals with indigenous populations, their protests, versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
The fact the emergency powers were used, to me, are a symptom of a broken system.
Either way, opposing political powers are jumping all over the opportunity to leverage the situation for their own gain.
I'm so sick of politics. They are all dishonest. No matter what, we lose.
No.
> versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
Also no, not white nationalists.
I have a feeling hardly any Canadians at all know what really happened in Ottawa even though there was and is extensive live video evidence streamed and stored on YouTube.
I have friends who live downtown Ottawa. I know exactly what went on. I know what flags were on display.
People need to stop down playing what happened.
Federal government workers generally live in Kanata and Orleans. Some work downtown, but generally it is a lot of private sector.
Do you have any proof of this or are you just being libelous?
> attempting to overthrow the Government.
If honking horns is enough to overthrow a government then the government is way to weak to exist.
Are there any actual examples of people making claims about going deaf due to the protests?
Doctors == generally low information value unless they have training in science or mathematics.
If you have some evidence that it’s safe to listen to sound levels above 90dB for extended periods of time, I’d recommend you publish it.
A woman took legal action against the protestors. In her action she called on an ENT. The ENT make the statements I outlined above under oath.
Search for it if you actually care. Again, I'm not wasting my time because nothing is ever good enough for the people who align ideologically with the convoy. The dismissiveness, what aboutisms, and misdirection that follow are never worth the effort.
Yet you imply that others should do exactly that in order to take seriously your insinuation that actual bodily harm was incurred. If you have proof that someone was physically damaged by the blowing of the truck horns then it will a simple thing for you supply this information of which you have implied you are the possessor.
If you do not have it and have never had it then you could also help by just stating that, so that no one wastes their time.
In both Canada and the US each "side" loves ratcheting up government power against what they perceive as their political enemies. It's going to end in tears.
You are simply not operating in reality. It wasn't untested, you weren't forced.
You don't know how to model trust and because of that you distrust experts even trustworthy experts.
Explain to me how willingness to take disease preventing treatment isn't just a feature of Whatwhaaaaat as an employee, that makes one more or less desirable on the free market? We are able free to work "at will" most places and any employer who will have you based on your marketability and desirability. Whatwhaaaaat could even start your own company where you mandated people not be vaccinated (and then die the first time someone sneezes).
More seriously, because this is a serious topic even if Whatwhaaaaat isn't a serious person:
We should all have a right to be healthy, where such things are within our power to understand and effect.
Whatwhaaaaat should have a right to opt out (even if I think it is childishly stupid).
The only way to make those both fit in reality is to have those who opt out of the incredibly but not quite perfectly safe and life saving vaccine in contradiction to all the evidence, is to have them opt out of activities where safety is desired by the majority. So you have a choice: opt-out of both the vaccine and some professional activities, or opt-in to both.
Note how this isn't a choice that Whatwhaaaaat, as a possible unknowing carrier of covid, is willing or even capable of offering immune compromised people in a work place. This is the only sensible way to structure a society that isn't literally forcing vaccines on people like Whatwhaaaaat.
Everything in America is tied to one’s employment. It was take the shot or starve. Luckily I’m a decent enough engineer to be able to say go fuck yourself and they had no choice but to keep me. MANY of my co workers were not in that position.
I will never vote for democrats again :-)
There is no evidence based reason to not take it for nearly all people, it was well tested and very safe. If you are immune compromised to the point where the vaccine was risky a doctor visit would sort you out. For nearly everyone else the vaccine moved the chances of covid death from some single digit percentage to negligible and reduced severity of symptoms and very rare (far rarer than covid issues).
Per your own story it was not "take the shot or starve", you are simply lying.
Just because I’ve been (so far) able to avoid negative repercussions does not mean that I should ignore attempts to unrightfully force medical therapy upon me and react accordingly.
I’m frankly kinda shocked there are still people arguing for it honestly.
Every conspiracy theory against isn't hasn't happened. All the mass deaths that were foretold didn't happen, all the claimed heart attacks were just noise that fools tried to elevate as signal, etc... But the real thing that is still with us is a new endemic disease that is killing people.
At best you are mistaken, more likely you are actively lying. You have, per your own story, been demonstrated as incorrect. No one should take you seriously.
Relevant because we’re supposed to trust the same industry that created the virus to save us.
The astrazeneca vaccine the one in the UK did have problems and was still safer than covid! Compare the payout rates to the amount of people vaccinated and try having some nuance. The existence of a solution to a problem doesn't mean the problem was the size conspiracy nutjobs say it was.
Making a cheap good for many people opens companies up to risk. Even frivolous lawsuits are expensive and if they are getting pennies per customer even a frivolous lawsuit can destroy the profits of millions of successes deployments. Vaccines like the last round had serious issues on the order of 1 in a million cases. Even that low rate is enough to crush profits with medical costs the way they are.
*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford%E2%80%93AstraZeneca_COV... actually was tested: they had suspicions it caused blood clots for a few people, then they found some slightly more suspicious data. Even then, taking it was better than taking nothing for the average person – just, there were other, safer vaccines available, so nobody informed would want to take it. Its administration was halted in most countries it was approved in, once there was some evidence of harm. But the correlation's still so weak that we're not really sure it's the vaccine causing it, or even if the effect is real.
Blood clot risk is still higher if you get COVID-19 than if you get this vaccine.
In general, the worst thing an uncontaminated vaccine can give you is mild symptoms of the disease it protects you against. We are very, very, very cautious about such things (I'd argue, too cautious, but when I take my utilitarian-debate-club hat off, I am similarly paranoid, so I don't begrudge them overmuch).
But it's also interesting to think about it from the perspective of immune system compartments: the vaccine is effective in preventing severe illness and death because it's injected. But people with mild to asymptomatic cases only ever "fight it" in their mucosal immune compartment, which doesn't share antibody recipes, so people who have only received a vaccine can still spread COVID-19, because the mucosal immune compartment is not trained by the vaccine. (Hopefully, there'll be an intranasal vaccine soon.) In general, this may also be related to your general health; the stronger your immune system is overall, the less likely you're going to develop a severe infection (barring a thousand other variables) because the virus never makes it in real numbers to your bloodstream, but if you do get a severe infection the immune reaction by itself is likely to be dangerous.
At least, that's why I assume two COVID infections prior to vaccination were barely noticeable, while the vaccination itself knocked me on my ass for days and also gave me a really weird neurological episode. If I had not been required to, I would not have gotten a vaccine, since I already had a verified COVID-19 infection and recovery. So unfortunately, our policy made me pretty sick for basically zero gain, and I knew going into it there was no real upside for me (but I didn't expect the downside.)
ed: it's also worth noting that "in general" is not very useful; in this case we're talking about vaccines leveraging new technology to deliver their payload. It's not implausible to believe that the LNPs are not safe - it took several years to identify LNPs that were not obviously toxic, and it would not be wild to imagine that years down the line we find the LNPs used in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are unsafe in the sense that you might be 20% more likely to develop RARE_CANCER_X 15 years from now. Great article on their development here:
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
That just means the conservatives can never be allowed to win elections...to protect Democracy!
That's what happens when there is change in the world. Conservatives resist change, but change often has a momentum of it's own.
The world has changed a lot recently. TV brought everyone together. Transportation made the world smaller place. The internet and social networks gave everyone a voice. These are all game changers. For better and worse. We can't un-invent all that stuff.
The reason older people tend to be conservative is that they are used to the way things were when they grew up. They don't like the changes. They want the good old days back.
Young people don't have these notions about the good old days, they weren't around. They started off with a different view of things. The Overton Window moves with them. Progress ratchets, as you said.
p.s. None of this implies that I endorse how the protests were handled. I'm all for democracy and 100% against authoritarians - whether they are communists or fascists or whatever else.
Recently we've seen a functional alliance of those on the bottom half of the diagram.
Just putting this into context:
> Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a committee of MPs that up to 210 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the financial measures contained in the Emergencies Act.
> She also said the fact that more than 200 bank accounts were frozen did not necessarily mean that more than 200 people lost access to their funds. Jacques said that individuals may have held more than one account affected by the measures.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
How dare a bunch of out-of-province blue collar roughnecks protesting logic-defying mandates being put on them disrupt the white collar workers sitting in their condo getting paid to watch tiger king.
(That said, thank you for demonstrating that I wasn't exaggerating.)
I was also never once confronted, cornered, harassed, or yelled at by protestors. Not once. These actions are not ok and not typical of any protest. Yes I was frequently inconvenienced with the street blocked, but that's fine, the cost of living in a democracy.
Protesting does not involve attacking fellow citizens.
"The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood."
Pretty much none of "lockdown" rules were federal - and at least in my province, I never felt more than mildly inconvenienced. Literally the worst thing I experienced was a shutdown of indoor team sports for a season.
If anyone is spewing shit, it's you mate.
Calm down and get a hobby.
But "overthrow" reads to me like the protestors sought to forcefully remove and replace the existing government. In other words, a coup. That is a very different statement, and one I would really like you to substantiate with evidence if that's what you're trying to claim.
It was very similar to the first few days of the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916, except with trucks. A large group of people held key infrastructure hostage, with unreasonable demands that would not be met.
Those claiming otherwise need everyone to believe their side is the victim.
I asked for a citation. If this is literally what the protest organizers did, then it should be easy to provide one. Their official Facebook page where they published their official position is still up.
If you care enough about challenging your own beliefs, and if it's so easy, you'll do it yourself. I'm not going to waste my time and energy trying to convince random strangers on the internet. I know better.
Do you have any evidence for this beyond simply postulating it as fact? I'd be really interested in seeing who in the convoy, and what proportion of people, were making these demands.
And no, it was not like the Easter Uprising. The Easter Uprising saw armed insurrectionists kill over a hundred government personnel and hundreds of civilians. This kind of comparison does not give me confidence in your analysis of the protest.
There are many many simularities.
I'm not going to waste my time searching the internet for something you're fully capable of doing yourself.
You know damn well that was their goal.
And again, this is the fourth time that you've just postulated this as fact rather than linking to the protest leaders' actual statements. I have searched the internet for any such statements calling for a forceful overthrow of the Canadian government, and I have not found any. No, I don't know that was their goal, and nothing in my searches indicate that it was. If you're serious about convincing people that the protestors posed a legitimate threat to democracy, you need to do a lot better than making claims with no evidence and telling people do their own research.
I Know you are full of shit, therefore I know you know you are full of shit
My hobby is calling bullshit and it is fun. There’s so much of it!
Edit: for extra context, the two people who took major time out of their lives to do this, one was in the Canadian Forces when they were younger (not at the time obv) and the other came to Canada in the early 90s after their government wrecked their country and was watching in horror of it happening to them again
Edit - a friend provided me with the following article. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027642231166...
Enjoy
If that is all you have then that is extremely weak. Plenty of movements don't have the best people in them...
The article linked was in reference to their weak ass attempt to overthrow the government.
And when that happened, it was immediately taken down by the rest of the protesters. Just admit that you fell for the alarmist propaganda and move on with your life.
Just because they sucked at communication, their demands changed minute by minute, doesn't mean that wasn't their intent. They absolutely tried to do this.
Stop being an apologist to a horrific group of people. They are so far from what represents this country and our democracy.
Prove it. What groups? Where were they? How many people were in these groups?
> Just because they sucked at communication, their demands changed minute by minute, doesn't mean that wasn't their intent. They absolutely tried to do this.
It sounds like you suck at communication since you cannot substantiate your claims that they wanted to overthrow the government, nor substantiate your claims that they were white nationalists, nor substantiate your claims that they wanted the conservatives to take power.
And even if "they wanted the conservatives to take power", that's ambiguous at best, and does not at all amount to "overthrowing the government". A democratic no-confidence vote could qualify as the conservatives taking over, but that doesn't qualify as overthrowing the democratically elected government. Broad protests that lead to a no-confidence vote is the definition of democracy in action.
So yes, you fell for alarmist propaganda from the media that had clear incentives to sensationalize what was happening. Which isn't to say the protest was legal or without problems, but the things you're saying about it simply aren't true.
The fact you keep coming back to this conversation when I'm clearly unwilling to put any effort in speaks volumes about you.
I don't need to prove anything, I don't need to substantiate anything. I owe you nothing. You're just some random stranger on the internet.
The closet thing I could find is:
> Others adopted more extreme positions. Some denounced what they defined as the authoritarian, treasonous, and corrupt governing practices of prime minister Justin Trudeau and requested the dissolution of the government
In parliamentary systems that does not mean abolishing the government or state or something like that. It means they want Trudeau to step down and they want new elections or at least a new coalition which results in a new prime minister.
Using the word dissolve and form and the like when it comes to parliamentary systems has nothing to do with overthrowing the government.
---
In terms of the flag, many people on HN supported occupy wall street. There were communist flags there. Does that mean everybody who supported the occupy movement wants to kill gay people like communists did? No, of course not.
Also, the other protestors weren't fans of the flag...
Can you quote directly from the article where it says anything close to that the protestors wanted to "overthrow the government"? I'm hesitant to call you a liar before giving you a chance to explain your point of view, but nothing I read in that link comes close to substantiating your claims.
These two details are important because:
1) no laws were passed and no courts were involved.
2) activities that were perfectly legal at the time, were deemed retroactively illegal and persecuted (not prosecuted - no courts, remember?).
The only regimes in which you see this are tinpot dictatorships and Trudeau's Canada.
Just imagine how powerful those two precedents are for any future radical who seeks to follow on the footsteps of the petite tyrant Trudeau.
We see this in the job growth numbers, for example, that show massive federal government hiring and anemic private sector growth. A market solution would have federal incentives create private sector growth to accomplish goals.
And, yes: Canada badly needs some kind of antitrust regime. Perhaps the reward for monopolization of a Canadian market should be nationalization.
Somehow, the people rushing to use that "faccism" label tend to ignore this one property of the original ones.
The change in Canada from 20 years ago is just shocking. If you can't see this, it is because you don't want to see it.
Canadians like you are why I think your country is utterly doomed.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/let-yourself-be-monitored-e...
Putin aspires to be a totalitarian leader but even he has not managed to pull it off. He depends quite heavily on a depoliticized "silent majority" of Russians who are too scared/complacent to challenge his security apparatus. If Russia were a totalitarian state then you'd see that majority rushing to join the military and join the government.
Either you forgot about COVID or you seem to have a case of Stockholm syndrom.e
Those which haven't had an issue with mandates shots seem to totally ignore what a schock the sitaution was for those who didnt approve.
Consider the similar backlash to mask mandates. I didn't like wearing a mask, but it's not a huge imposition. Some people treated it like it was greatest injustice they'd ever experienced though. And then they went on to rationalize this emotional reaction by making up shit about masks cutting off their oxygen supply or causing brain damage, etc. All this despite the fact that wearing a mask (or even a respirator) is necessary for a big chunk of the day in many jobs ranging from construction workers to surgeons.
Just to try again and whip some empathy into you: I have been subjected to a medical experiment by a left-over nazi doctor in the 80s, and the result was that my eyesight went from 20% to 0%. This is a true story. My parents were not informed about what the doctor was going to try, and it was also explicitly against the explicit advice of another clinic not to touch that eye with any invasive treatment. Given my history, I definitely didn't aproove of being forced into another medical experiment. Social responsibility be damned!
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences with the medical system. It's certainly not good at treating patients with respect - even today. But consider that if the vast majority of the population was willing to get the COVID vaccine voluntarily the mandates would not be necessary. People like yourself would likely be able to opt out freely thanks to herd immunity.
In a lot of ways my main feeling about COVID is disappointment. COVID was an opportunity for people to come together and make a small sacrifice to contribute to protecting the weakest among us. Instead it turned into an everyone-for-themselves shitshow. I remember visiting Hong Kong in 2008 and I was amazed to see how many people wore surgical masks in public. This was probably carry over from the SARS outbreak in 2003. To me it showed a high level of care and empathy for others that people were willing to set aside their own comfort to try to prevent spreading whatever cold of flu they were carrying. I wish we could adopt some of that attitude here in North America.
however, I'm most curious to hear of "left-over" Nazis practicing in the 80s. however, I agree that the medical establishment is an absurd archaism.
Besides, I totally fail how you create that box. Not every anti-experimental-vaxer is anti abortion. Heck, most people I know who didn't approve of mandatory vaccination were always voting left. But sure, if you like to think that everyone with a different opinion then you can conveniently be put into the right-wing box, go ahead. You're being silly, though.
The convoy drastically overstated the mandates. In practice the vaccine mandate they wanted removed was the one requiring vaccines upon entering Canada so they could go to the US. However, the US had the same requirement so it was a moot point. Furthermore, any sovereign state can determine who can and can't cross their borders. Vaccines is absolutely one of the requirements that are used by some countries. Anyone who's seriously traveled would know that.
We can agree that politicians are idiots. They are sewing division in ways I haven't seen in our country. Many of the issues being brought the forefront won't improve anyone's lives. We need housing addressed, we need the wage productivity gap addressed, we need education and healthcare addressed. These things will have generational impact.
The cognitive dissonance you Pee Pee followers have to navigate is incredible.
Some people get medical autonomy, others don't. Makes sense.
Canada is not totalitarian. Frankly, I can't imagine claiming so unless you have quite an extreme view of politics (for instance, the appropriateness of blockading downtown Ottawa). There is plenty of MAGA-like conspiratory thinking in Canada, but it's relatively new for Canada, and definitely not widely-accepted.
There's no shortage of Americans who wholeheartedly believe that Canada is an authoritarian regime. Given that the average HN user seems to be an older, conservative-leaning American I'm not really surprised by the sentiment, though I did hope for more level-headed discussions.
It also doesn't help that the same government has admitted to a current genocide without basically doing anything about it. So yes, when you combine those two things criticism will happen.
At no point in the last several decades has any Canadian government come close to being totalitarian, authoritarian, or otherwise. The most recent example in living memory (which I don't intend to downplay) would've been residential schools, which were run by churches with supportive policies coming from the federal (and lower) governments. The last residential school closed in 1997.
Canada is absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt, a representative democracy falling under the broad umbrella of "Western (Neo)liberal democracies". There are legitimate criticisms of neoliberalism just as there are of neoconservativism, but totalitarian aspirations are exceptionally rarely a valid accusation.
If anything, the biggest threat to Canadian democracy might be a decline in political literacy. We don't have an election where we vote for PMs, but many people still do. We don't have a two-party system; in practice, we have a multi-party system to the extent that minority governments are possible (we have one now!), but many people vote as though we're in a two-party system with a handful of "joke parties" that amount to wasting your vote. We have a bicameral parliament, but one of our chambers is made up purely of elected members who have so far mostly stayed level-headed through more or less sheer force of good will (which I don't consider a good enough protection in the long term, but that's another topic).
How laws are introduced into parliament and passed is something most Canadians probably couldn't answer off the top of their heads in more detail than saying that there there are a few readings, and most of us aren't following what our MP or MPP is doing for your riding, because in real terms, most of us vote based on a party leader and their at-large actions in office.