Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.

This is a terrifying comment and you should really start re-examining your outlook on life. I really hope you are nowhere near any sort of lever of power.

What should terrify you is police refusing to do their jobs.

You can't occupy a city and refuse to leave without consequences. Unfortunately the consequences are what they are for these misguided truckers. They should have had their trucks impounded permanently, because they proved that they can't be trusted not to hold a country hostage with them. This was a terrorist situation, the truckers were terrorizing citizens, and preventing emergency vehicles, and commerce. The truckers absolutely caused chaos, and so they have chaos coming to their lives too as a result. And yes, I have plenty of power, all the power I need - and I'm not even sure why you attack me this way. Apparently Trudeau had power and used it to rightfully punish terrorists.

You are openly championing and celebrating elsewhere in this thread, the Canadian government _going after the families_ of the people _you say_ are terrorists because the Canadian government was unable to address the actual issue at hand?

Do you not hear yourself?

I think this is better framed as "joined the protest", from the perspective of the police. As a US analogy, sanctuary cities or states with "legalized" marijuana have police who are refusing to do their job. Should thenfederal government freeze the accounta of police officers until they do?

If the thing your doing is causing such unrest, perhaps the government shouldn't be doing that thing.

Nobody went after anyone's family.

If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.

People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.

> "It was an overcharge to begin with," Beyak said.

> He said if police tried to storm the barricade, he would "slit their throats."

I don’t think you have any sources to back that up.

This is what a protest is. (French here). If protesters go as far, and in Canada it was because you did them dirty, then you must sit at a table and negotiate. You must sit at a table and negotiate with everyone in a country. You cannot do someone dirty then complain that they protest.

It’s effects removing the right to protest, and therefore, removing democracy itself. Go live in Singapore?

They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).

If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.

Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.

If you are expecting protests to force someone's hand, that isn't protest or protected political speech, that's coercion. Some forms of that are legal (e.g., strikes), but there are pretty sharply defined limits.

As a sympathizer to the HK protests, I've heard all these talking points before -- that the protesters are ruining the economy and making things miserable for everyone. Usually the protests can really only get so big when there is a shared grievance that keeps getting ignored by the administration.

In the case of HK, the grievance was the possibility for criminals to be extradited to Chinese mainland.

In the case of convoy protests, the grievance was the vaccine mandate in order to work a trucking job that's mostly solitary with minimal human contact.

Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.

A particularly odious moral framework, mostly used to justify mass murder.

I take exception to the framing of “attempts to settle this.” The government used violence and threat of violence to make the problem go away. There wasn’t an attempt at compromise. Do what I say or else isn’t an attempt to settle.

Typically such measures are mandated by court order, not executive fiat.

By your logic they should be.

And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...

I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.

Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.

This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.

The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.

There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.

Travel the country up and down, big cities and small towns, and I guarantee you will conclude that Canadians are the best people around.

1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.

And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.

Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.

I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.

So the most annoyed 1% of Canadians go through there every day.

Not the world’s most rigorous basis for a sweeping statement about an entire culture.

The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.

It’s just a whole bunch of stressed people in a hurry.

I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.

It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.

The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.

120dB train horns at 2AM in the morning in a residential area is not a minor inconvenience.

If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.

For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.

I'm so sorry that you were inconvenienced.

I would label this as an inconvenience. A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.

Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.

I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.

The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.

The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.

Yeah, that kind of comment pops up after "non-violent" protest that privates innocent people of fundamental rights.

Get someone to put you in sleep-deprivation torture for a few days, and tell us back how minor of an inconvenience it is.

As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?

Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.

Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.

Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.

South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.

Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.

You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.

Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.

For example, https://www.google.com/maps/place/9+Rideau+St,+Ottawa,+ON+K1... is a condo building.

When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.

i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

World-renowned pianist Angela Hewitt would disagree:

* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/angela-hewitt-play...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Hewitt

Her living room, with her piano, is in the area.

It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.

And I remember a few motorist incidents, but numerous? Certainly more than I would prefer.

I think this is important regardless of whether you believe in their specific target of protest or not. The right to peacefully protest is very very important, and your feelings on a specific protest should be wholly divorced from the importance of preserving the right to protest in general.

Nobody was held hostage. People unhappy with their rulers took peacefully to the streets and made noise and peacefully and temporarily interfered with some business activity.

This is the furthest thing from “holding the government hostage”. It’s the adversarial relationship between the populace and the state working exactly as intended and designed.

This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.

It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.

For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.

Nobody’s safety was jeopardized. Some disruption is the point of a protest; you can’t operate the building during a sit-in, for example.

“protest in a way that doesn’t affect anything and allows society to ignore you” is not a legitimate or constructive type of feedback.

Wait, are people that shocked that their democratic governments are wiling to act like mobsters/dictators against a minority group just to get their way and appease a majority, when the history books are full of such examples? People must have a short memory then and why history repeating itself is a fact.

edit: over the totality of history, tens of millions at a minimum

To me a vaccine denier is no different, at all, from a North Korean public affairs official weaving tales of Kim Jong Un's exploits except the North Korean is responsible for fewer deaths and less overall harm to humanity.

They are the same as a scammer telling you that a hologram sticker stuck to a plastic wristband will cure your disease.

They are the same as Bernie Madoff sliding a monthly statement from across the table to in front of you, smiling, and saying "look how good you did last month".

But we have freedumb, so yay?

You're just advocating for tyranny "in the name of good", because you see your own flavor of tyranny being well intended and for the greeter good, which is exactly how Hitler and other dictators in history got to power, oppressed caused suffering of minorities.

Throughout history they all though their tyranny was in the name of good, that they were the good guys on the right side of history and that their ends justified the means, they didn't call themselves "the party of evil guys who wear cool hats" but they called themselves the "national socialistic party" fighting for the workers and the common man. How did that turn out?

The road to hell is always paved with good intentions.

They did in Australia, and they did save a lot of lives.

The USA had 1,219,487 deaths for 346.4 million people (3520 deaths per million) [1]

Australia had 24,414 deaths for 26.8 million people (910 deaths per million) [1]

If Australia had the same rate of deaths as the USA, then 94,336 people would have died from covid. Therefore Australia's "draconian" COVID policies saved the lives of 69,900 people, which is 0.26% of the entire population.

Anyone who doesn't like this should think about which members of their immediate family they want included in that 70,000 deaths.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

What exactly was flamewar about posting that countries of people aren't guinea pig cages? Go on, enlighten me please. What rule did that comment break? Did you even read my comment or are you swinging your hammer based on people abusing the flag button?

In your case, I wasn't just responding to one comment but to your pattern of commenting; note the word "repeatedly" in my post. That's a reference to other comments like these, from the current thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612466

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612129

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612019

... as well as sundry others from other theads; here are some recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565173

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42560453

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42543675

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42493547

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472874

Your pattern of commenting includes inflammatory rhetoric, being aggressive to other users, cross-examination, name-calling, political and ideological battle, sneering at the rest of the community, and other things that clearly break the HN guidelines–and that's just with your current account.

It's true that your comment that I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612748) was one of the lesser cases of this, but it still included inflammatory rhetoric ("and if my mom had balls she's be my dad" adds no information—it's just a putdown, and ditto for "America, Australia, Canada, Europe etc, aren't interchangeable lab cages of guinea pigs", since no one is arguing that they are). But the rest of that comment was just fine. The reason I replied there is not because I thought it was the worst case, but because it was a leaf node in the thread. The issue, as I said, is the pattern of your comments. You're breaking the site guidelines so often that your account is on the line of being one that we would ban, if not over the line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Canada is not the US. Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?

i.e. When there is Parliamentary sovereignty/supremacy?

An inferior authority can never legally overrule a superior authority by definition.

Then there is an external guarantor of the rights of the people against the government.

…the coëqual judiciary.

It was a politically motivated protest run by people from the USA on Canadian soil.

Political protesting by citizens about things their own government is doing is good and we need it.

Political protests by foreign countries is NOT good for democracy, and I personally feel Trudeau was protecting Canada's interests when he tried to shut it down any way he could.

Actually I wish he had been more heavy handed.

How would you like your government to handle a political protest funded by Russians or North Koreans shutting down a couple of your major cities?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/15/ame...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-american-right-wing-f...

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).

I didn't know Canadians were such Good Germans!

According to that logic, the protestors during the Oka Crisis should've just been arrested, stripped of their rights and treated like non citizens since they were armed and threatened the police. Yet a better government back then realized that you can't just use emergency powers for every inconvenience, and didn't use them. They instead talked and engaged in discussions with them, which resolved the Oka Crisis peacefully.

Well, apart from the fighting and that young woman who was bayoneted while carrying her infant sister.

I’m not here to carry water for the asshat truckers, and I don’t understand the Canadian constitution or legal system, but the Oka Crisis was resolved with enough brutality for at least one crow pie.

In fact, the federal government tried appeasement whereas the provincial government was more brutal.

Also, is this like when the FBI discovers a plot to kidnap a Governor and half of the conspirators are paid FBI informants?

It's a clear sign that your government is failing its responsibilities. The US has done it too.

Your government is with a straight face telling you that it doesn't legitimately have enough control over you so it needs to create extra-legal means of having control over you.

It's tyranny. There's a reason these acts only can get passed in war time. The population is too busy pissing its pants to realize when it's getting shafted.

You may want to take a step back from the keyboard.

They conspired to murder police officers [1]. That goes far beyond honking horns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_alleged_plot_to_kill_Cout...

No more of this, please—it just leads to predictable, tedious internet hell.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612168.

Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32890469 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30334539 (Feb 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946008 (May 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17660350 (Aug 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16545769 (March 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13900218 (March 2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9983880 (July 2015)

Edit 2: you've posted 3 dozen comments in this thread, breaking the site guidelines left and right. WTF? I don't want to ban you (obviously, having cut you almost 10 years of slack already) but this is beyond the pale. You've been here for 12 years and ought to be a much better citizen of this place. First and foremost, that has to do with how you treat people (and positions) that you disagree with. If you want to keep posting to Hacker News, please fix this once and for all.

Are you giving me so much slack or the people who uncritically tout fascistic, totalitarian ideas like "non-violent protestors should be labeled as terrorists and stripped of their rights using wartime emergency powers"? In any polite environment with serious, considered thinkers this should be met with derision but viewpoints like that consistently go unchallenged by moderation here. This was even called out by other posters on one of your linked threads where you moderated me on literally this exact same topic.

The "Good Germans" comment isn't flamebait, it's just the most succinct way of wording such opinions for what they are. To suggest and encourage such actions and overreach and even that it was that PM's most popular political action very much suggests that they are Good Germans. And if that type of disgusting rhetoric is supposed to be treated civily here on HN, maybe HN are Good Germans too. If that's the type of place this is, I don't want to be here.

I honestly don't think that you have the proper perspective to moderate sensitive political topics. "Be Nice and Follow the Rules" doesn't work against people who color within the lines while advocating for extralegal authority to deny people access to "the Rules".

Maybe HN guidelines need a wartime emergency powers guideline...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615237

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613907

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613574

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613325

No one who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use HN as intended should be posting such things. These are not borderline cases. The fact that some of your other posts were fine doesn't make it ok, any more than helping old ladies cross the street makes it ok to rob banks. I wish it were otherwise, but moderation has to go by bad deeds, not good deeds.

Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.

Of course it's always with the best of intentions that peoples' rights get stripped away from them.

Though since COVID I'm hardly surprised anymore when serious people expose themselves to be unabashedly authoritarian.

If by some accident of foolish politics we established a government in which we had such a right, that right would immediately conflict with and require reconciliation with the right to life, and require adjudication in whatever body we establish to handle contradictory rights.

I have no idea how something that is intrinsically legally, ethically, and morally grey has been translated into black and white "muh rights" talk so consistently and without any apparent attempt at reflection.

Read for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_violence_incide...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests#United_S...

> At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., activated over 96,000 National Guard and State Guard service members.[33][34][35][36] The deployment constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[37]

Conservatives are just snowflakes because it happened to their guys just one time.

Tell that to Typhoid Mary.

Which is what the "trucker convoy" was.

1: of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority

2: of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people

It was quite pointedly, exactly neither of these. Words have meanings.

i.e. Not constitutionally responsible to the people.

Words have meaning, as do actions, sir, and you're choose to ignore both because of your partisan blind spots.

There was no "peaceful" presentation of grievance. There was weeks of civil disobedience and actual acts of violence.

The twisted part, again, is the ideologically biased game you're playing.

Reminder that blocked traffic and hurt feelings are not violence, otherwise we'd need to classify every climate action as unbearably and irrevocably violent.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.6400768

even on the anniversary:

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/officers-issued-multiple-violation...

How about two seconds of googling? Or are you afraid of having your world view threatened?

>https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.6400768 Obstruction/assault of police officer. IE, altercation with police. Expected at a protest.

>https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/officers-issued-multiple-violation... One man charged with assault. You finally found one, congratulations. No details whether it was protest related, or just happened to be in the area. Could have been a provocation. Which would also be expected at a large protest.

None of these articles paint a picture of untoward violence any worse than what goes on at a normal pop/rock concert.

But I suppose pearl clutchers are gonna clutch (and not read their own articles).

Will you press charges and expect the police to respond?

Also when your wife leaves the house, someone (not me) will follow her and harass her for wearing a mask.

Then an ambulance will come by to pick up your elderly relative and someone will make sure my truck is in front of it, stopping it from getting to the hospital, because the hospital is a place that poisons people with COVID jabs.

This is all ok and peaceful behaviour, to you? Right?

Tell me how you feel about the January 6th event, while you're at it. How about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch?

Partisans love to play this game, where they judge a large group of people by the worst possible interpretation of the actions of a tiny subset of them.

For a protest which some estimates say peaked at ~18,000, this was the resulting set of "violent" charges:

"12 charges of assaulting a peace officer; six charges of assault; three charges of assault or intimidation with a weapon; five charges of possessing a weapon dangerous to public peace; two charges of carrying a concealed weapon; one charge of possessing a restricted firearm; and four charges of uttering threats of death or bodily harm." [0]

Obviously this is not acceptable, but the idea that the protesters as a group were "authoritarians" because 0.01% of them got violent is hysterical nonsense.

[0] https://archive.is/8VYvr#selection-4877.151-4877.502

(Also... Partisan hardly describes me. I've never voted Liberal in my life and have been opposed to this PM since day one. Ask any of my annoyed coworkers and friends.)

The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.

And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.

The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.

Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.

Crazy that you actually talk about steering to the right, as if your comment which revolves around "If you disrupt an economic activity you deserve every right stripped away from you". That's as right wing as it gets lol.

Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.

Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.

I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.

The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.

It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.

Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.

Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.

In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.

Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.

Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.

Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.

The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.

So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.

I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.

Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.

I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."

And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.

Maybe.

I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.

But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?

It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.

It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.

The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.

A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.

I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.

Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.

If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.

Comfortably working remotely, like I was, right?

That might explain why you can't sympathize with people who lost their jobs or businesses due to COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates.

I also think the protest was over the top, but it pales in comparison to what COVID did to people.

I do not sympathise with people who refuse vaccination because I had to serve them when they were at their worst.

It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.

Emergency powers should only be used in extreme cases, like war or actual civil wars. Not because a government official was killed or because a group of people dared to bother federal government workers in the capital.

So no, it hasn't been doing the same. Bush and his cronies sure would've wanted to go further though, I agree.

Also, another difference is that the Patriot act has been very controversial in the years since. Whereas the same hasn't been true in Canada for the usage of emergency power. And no one seems to care that we see more and more laws passed with the non-withstanding clause either.

Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.

That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.

(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)

Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;

several political activists from various groups across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.

I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.

The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.

Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.

My contract was not renewed"

https://www.mat.uc.pt/~picado/lawvere/interview.pdf

For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.

As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).

> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.

Wat?

* https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...

There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.

Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:

> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;

* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/page-1.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act

And the use of the withstanding clause has to be re-up every five years, as that is the maximum time before a new election is held so that The People™ can decide if they want to continue with it:

> (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

* https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...

> Can you show me a single piece of legislation that used that clause and that was still overturned?

The point of the clause was so that The People™, through their duly elected representatives, would have the final say in matters of government and not judges (who are potentially answerable to no one). Whether it should be judges that have the final say (like in the US) or legislators (like in the UK) is up for debate: in Canada it was decided to split the difference.

Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.

See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.

You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).

I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.

Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.

If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.

All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.

> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.

The Charter is part of the Constitution:

* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/index.html

The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:

> 1 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

  We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't.

America had human slaves built into its democracy until the majority said otherwise. Unsure why this is so shocking.

The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.

The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.

I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.

>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.

I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?

What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.

I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.

This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.

For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.

> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.

The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.

It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.

A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.

The people whose rights were stripped didn't bother the federal government workers - they bothered the residents of Ottawa. Don't fall into the US Republican trap of treating the capital as if it's the sole domain of federal workers and therefore are pawns of the current administration. Ottawa is an urban area of over 1 million people. What about the rights of those residents?

I don't have a lot of patience for slippery slope arguments here. These powers were not abused. The truckers were intolerant, hostile, and dangerous. And they were petulant about public health issues during a significant pandemic. That the federal government cracked down on them says nothing about what the federal government will do against your minority if you disagree with them in the future.

Just because you can imagine hypothetical future tyranny doesn't mean the government shouldn't use powers to prevent the tyranny of protestors like the truckers.

Citation needed.

The US government had Canadian citizens deported and tortured in Syrian prisons without a single charge being laid. How's that?

Oh, and the conservative opposition party in Canada a the time -- Pierre P's party -- cheered it on and jeered in parliament when this injustice was brought up.

(I don't care what side of the argument people are on—I care who is breaking the site guidelines and making HN a more hellish place.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've had to ask you this before not long ago, so it would be good if you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please fix this.

I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread. A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes. Context here is important given news in recent weeks, with Trudeau's name on the lips of people like Trump, Musk, etc.

I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point. I'm sure my passion is showing through, but it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out.

There are some issues which trigger emotional response. I usually don't get into the back and forth response, but this is a seriously frustrating thread and I think if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic (we have people driving around with bumper stickers reading "F* Trudeau" and this whole topic is tied in with COVID, vaccines, etc. etc.) will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic.

You might also want to review your flagged comments on thread.

Among those, predicting downvotes and characterising the HN readership and/or opposition specifically goes against guidelines.

You can review previous interactions with dang here:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=cmrdporcupine&by=dan...>

(There's an admonishment or two in there, take them seriously.)

> it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating

I know, and I wish I had the cycles to clarify this in every case. It's just not physically possible. If you look at the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629499, I wrote a longer explanation about this for a different user who was asking the same thing (...albeit in a rather less polite way).

> I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point

Yes and that's why I don't want to ban you, as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073831.

> I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread.

Me too, which is why I spent hours moderating it and posted 20 or so requests to people to stop, as well as a general admonition at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616355.

> A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes.

Such perceptions aren't reliable. Internet readers tend to back-fit such perceptions to their assumptions about who would be holding a given position and why; but these assumptions are frequently contradicted by the data. Unfortunately it's not data that we can publish without violating people's privacy. I can tell you, though, that many commenters opposing your views were posting from Canadian IP addresses and many commenters supporting your views were posting from IP addresses outside Canada. That's not a perfect indicator but it's clear to me that this argument breaks down on ideological lines, not national lines.

> it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out

You were in no way being singled out, and certainly not given your citizenship (which incidentally I share). If you look through my other posts in this thread (not that I recommend it), you'll see how many other admonishments I posted. We're as careful as we know how to be to moderate HN based on the site guidelines, not people's views, let alone their background, nationality, or anything like that.

There were tons of other users breaking the site guidelines in this thread, but it wasn't physically possible to get to them all. Unfortunately people tend to jump to the conclusion that when they see a bad post going unmoderated, it means the mods must secretly agree with it. Nothing could be further from true, and the likeliest reason is just that we didn't see it.

> There are some issues which trigger emotional response.

Indeed there are. The question then is how well we can manage our emotional responses. Commenters here are asked to do that regardless of how wrong others are or one feels they are. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) can't do that without remaining respectful to others, it's best to wait until your activation has settled to the point when you can. That's not easy, of course.

[editing - bear with me...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Depending on the severity, I can even be facing administrative charges of patient abandonment under my state's Administrative Code for standards of care for providers.

Consider it, instead, that the police, as a whole, joined the protest which also had a decent amount of support from the populous.

That's a far cry from one person refusing to do their job with very little (almost none) support from the populous, as your analogy would be.

If it was a single cop refusing to arrest a Nazi for a crime because they agreed with them, that cop would be fired.

Same applies here. If 10 officers misbehave, it is easy to fire them all, as you suggest.

If a majority of the entire police force defects, your only choice is between limiting the scope of the punishment to a few ringleaders vs. basically disbanding the police force and starting a new one from scratch, hoping that you can even recruit enough people to do so; but, in the meantime, the city won't be policed anymore, as the entire institutional memory has been purged.

In most similar cases in history, the authorities opted for a blanket pardon, as it is much less of a headache.

It is not even a new problem. Police is a relatively recent institution, but armies, gendarmes, legions etc. rebelled all the time, and peace usually had to be bought by concessions.

The most significant example I'm aware of is Camden New Jersey.

The city’s crime rate was among the worst in the US. Within nine square miles and among nearly 75,000 residents, there were over 170 open-air drug markets reported in 2013, county officials told CNN. Violent crime abounded. Police corruption was at the core.

Lawsuits filed against the department uncovered that officers routinely planted evidence on suspects, fabricated reports and committed perjury. After the corruption was exposed, courts overturned the convictions of 88 people, the ACLU reported in 2013.

So in 2012, officials voted to completely disband the department – it was beyond reform.

And in 2013, the Camden County Police Department officially began its tenure. No other city of Camden’s size has done anything quite like it.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-...

When the police start siding with protestors that’s a government problem, not police problem.

We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.

I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.

If I remember properly, offering the service for free (for instance in public transport) bear the risk of being held personally responsible of any damage or accident that would happen to anyone (which is not unlikely if you factor in provocations)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmiKG56zuw

[0] https://youtu.be/f7YIpSWqT0s?si=0DdPECPkBcU1AKKj

* It definitely wasn't peaceful -- activists and Ottawa residents documented numerous incidents of violence, harassment, threats, vandalism, and so on in Ottawa. This document compiles some of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...

* Organizers encouraged participants to bring more children when it became clear police action was imminent, presumably to complicate law enforcement efforts. A Facebook post even suggested adding bouncy castles to "contribute to the fun" during these escalations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/freedom-conv...

* In the case of Ambassador Bridge, some reportedly put their children in front of the police. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/convoy-protests-total-ar...

* There’s academic discussion suggesting that children and family-friendly elements were intentionally brought in for PR and to slow the police response. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cag.12909?af=R

* Despite claims of peaceful protest, there were reports of ambulances being blocked or even pelted with rocks. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...

* This is without getting into the hate speech. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B...

* Pushing a reporter live on air: https://x.com/mylenecrete/status/1494874304814751744

* Beating a counter-protestor on camera: https://x.com/timabray/status/1488231660260839430?t=Bx4fGVxR...

* Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=23006638534070...

* Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag: https://imgur.com/a/80bmPQ8

* Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building: https://x.com/gray_mackenzie/status/1492705868697198593

* Encouraging harassment of the lawyer leading the class action lawsuit against them: https://www.facebook.com/groups/217129079397701/permalink/62...

* Threatening public officials: https://www.ottawapolice.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=7...

* Spamming emergency services so they could not be used: https://x.com/OttawaPolice/status/1491788988654383115

* Harassing children at an elementary school: https://pressprogress.ca/elementary-school-students-and-teac...

* Bomb threats against a children's hospital: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/cheo-targeted-by-bomb-threat-monda...

* Pelting ambulances with rocks: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...

These are just the things that were recorded, reported on, and archived with the links functioning three years later. Scroll up and you can read about what many of us saw in person. And yes, there's more where that came from. But it's much better to read from people who live in Ottawa and want to share their experiences: https://www.opc-cpo.ca/

The first and second happened only a couple blocks away from us, and we frequented both businesses, so it was infuriating to see them and their employers attacked like that. We lived in an apartment building so the third one was pretty alarming.

Also, it takes a couple of hours to get the police to unblock a road. Last time I checked, money movement in bank accounts does not block roads.

Blocking a road is a fire hazard and should never have been tolerated by local police for that reason alone. You cannot impede transit in a city.

The mishandled response to the trucker protest should be blamed on the city and the province, not on Trudeau.

Not saying they did right, but curious.

Those would be my starting place.

I also dont see why the emergency act, if declared, couldn't be used to enforce existing laws and remove the truckers.

I think my core point is that there are conventional and broadly accepted methods to take when people are breaking the law. People breaking the law does not provide a blank check to stop them by any means desired.

And like, I agree with you in general, I just don’t see the action as an abuse of power. The economic intervention was also accompanied by on the ground action, as you said should have happened. At the time there were lots of questions about foreign interference in funding the protest, that’s why their accounts were frozen.

I don't know exactly how Federalism works in Canada but the answer is their jobs. If that doesn't entail stepping in to provincial business, they shouldn't do anything.

There doesn't always have to be something done.

Please, this is just preposterous.

Two seconds of attention to who the key leaders of this "protest" were should cause you to question its legitimacy.

Every single vaccine or gathering mandate I experienced was either provincial (Conservatives) or municipal (also conservative for Toronto and georgetown where I live).that they barked up the completely wrong tree is the breathtakingly depressing stupidity behind the whole thing.

Don't believe me? Alberta Conservatives did not have same policies. Then they begged BC and Saskatchewan for ICU beds but that's besides the point - provinces and municipalities had freedom to enact different policies.

Meanwhile the feds only had jurisdiction over borders and airports. They acquired the vaccines, but it was the provinces that doled them out and set the policies for what would require them.

At the height of covid Ford even had outdoor ski hills shut down. Crazy times. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But I can tell you my neighbours with F Trudeau stickers were very angry about the vaccines, but still somehow are voting for Ford. Confusing.

I personally think Chrétien was a terrible offender, since his balanced budgets in the 90’s were a result of pushing responsibilities on the provinces. The current wave of conservative provincial governments have similarly created their own problems (particularly with the international student explosion) while placing all of the blame of the federal government.

Harris/Klein + Chretien was a deadly combination, and more intimately connected than people will admit. Supposed ideological opponents, but the latter created the conditions for the former to thrive.

Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".

> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.

https://thewalrus.ca/freedom-convoy-the-prince/

Maybe the correct move was to resign if it got that bad.

Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.

Wut?

The RCMP reports to Parliament up through the Public Safety minister. The bucks stops with the PM.

The federal government has not only the right but the obligation to hold the RCMP accountable.

This was actually discussed as a specific controversy at the time the convoy was undergoing. Trudeau getting on the phone with chief of police and asking him to clear the protest would be a serious breach of political standards in our democracy.

Also the police in question here are the Ottawa Police Service, not the RCMP, I believe.

And I'd disagree about breeching political standards. The police are an executive function and report to the PM. I'd like to think Canadians know that.

The Ottawa police, report to the city of Ottawa. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Police_Service)

The Ontario police, report to the Province of Ontario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Provincial_Police)

The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."

The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.

Some Canadians may know the above.

RCMP

Minister responsible Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Public Safety

How a Canadian doesn’t know the structure of their federal government is beyond me.

Your local cops don't report to the president.

The RCMP don't have jurisdiction in Ottawa. You said it yourself, it's the federal government and it's not the same as the municipal government.

The federal govt sets standards and expectations and framework for the RCMP. It should not, and does not (hopefully), tell them what to do on specific case files.

This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151

Similar concerns happened when Harper and Ottawa mayor at the time denied the rights and freedoms of protestors of the G20.

It's concerning how the "true north, strong, and free" is losing that last part.

Where on earth does this stat come from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Opinion_pollin...

Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.

That has historically been their explicit policy in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_terti...).

A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.

No, I'm not. I cited a document titled "Wikipedia is a tertiary source" in order to establish that prominently citing secondary sources (which is what makes Wikipedia a tertiary source) is established Wikipedia policy (as described in the document).

Yes, it's stated there that tertiary sources can in principle cite primary sources directly. But in practice, if you try this, you'll be accused of violating Wikipedia policy: in particular, primary sources for anything vaguely political will not be considered reliable (even though the dependence on secondary sources from the approved list is a major source of bias) and if you can't find an acceptable secondary source then other editors will conclude that the material is not notable.

> A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.

I agree; but as far as Wikipedians seem to be concerned, if newsletter XY is on the approved RS list, things that it says happened must have actually happened (and you'll only be allowed to challenge that with another source from the approved RS list; they'll say you're doing "original research" by pointing out directly that the poll doesn't actually say ABC, because that's, like, just your analysis of the poll).

Wikipedia is not concerned with truth, in that being able to disprove content in supposedly reliable sources doesn't entitle you to correct the material.

It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.

The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.

I cannot comprehend how it could be overwhelmingly supported.

> Facebook stated that they had removed fake users that were set up in overseas content farms, in Romania, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, which were promoting the convoy protests in Canada. (https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-congress-asks-facebook-role-2258...)

> An Economist/YouGov poll conducted from February 12 to 15 found that 80% of Americans had heard of the convoy protests. [...] Among Republicans, 71 per cent supported the convoy protests, compared to 18 per cent of Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Opinion_...)

When you consider how much attention the convoy got in America, and how sympathies fell on such partisan grounds, it gets more concerning. Suddenly, Canadian politics is a hunting ground for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, online bot mobs... I think you see where I’m going.

It’s difficult to approach these discussions and not feel like bad-faith actors are artificially making a bugbear out of it. This is especially true when many of the loudest defenders of the convoy weren’t even there, aren't even Canadian, and -- three years later -- may not even be people.

That said, I can agree the Emergencies Act probably shouldn't have been used here, and I have question marks about freezing people's bank accounts -- but this is really a conversation actual Canadians should be owning, since it concerns us most directly.

The convoy drove across the country, broadcasting their intentions on social media. Yet, everyone acted shocked when they did exactly what they said they were going to do.

I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau, but they were completely disrespectful to other citizens, and I could never defend their actions. However, irrespective of how unpopular their actions were, the courts have deemed the federal government's response unreasonable and unconstitutional, and I agree with that assessment.

The government could have dealt with this earlier and more directly, but whatever passes for "leadership" these days in Canada has proven itself completely inept.

Personally, I would like to see an inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, but I guess that’s not considered a pressing issue anymore.

The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.

I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things. This includes the right to express dissent against other citizens to whom we have delegated certain decision-making responsibilities. A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.

At the time, I think we were also in stage 2 lockdown(which should have been enough to stop it), so the people bearing the brunt of these actions, whatever you want to label it as, were not the ones making those decisions. Our elected officials don't live inside Parliament Hill.

Then they need to be renamed.

Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.

Because protesting has always been about, to some degree, inconveniencing others to achieve your political aims.

Playing devil's advocate here: what if it wasn't mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What if the CRF didn't exist to start with?

(my point being that when things are very bad, certain things need to be done regardless of what a formal law states, you cannot let tyranny call the shots)

Canada is ruled by the British king/queen, even if only symbolically.

>A permit isn't about seeking permission

A permit is permission in granted form. Perhaps you meant something else, it's a poor choice of words.

That is what a protest is. The collective agrees, not their rulers.

> A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.

I don't agree here, and even if that were so, there's a stark difference between the original intention and the ultimate use of permission as a tool.

We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.

I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.

We were encouraged to bring our kids, and criticized by the opposition for doing so. Our kids had a great time and learned the value political participation.

The protest was 100% successful at it achieving its one, narrow aim.

I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".

Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.

The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.

When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.

At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.

There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.

If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).

>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.

It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.

>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.

Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?

>and none of what the protesters did mattered.

We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.

>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted

Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.

What exactly would you do if you were a trucker? i.e your livelihood has been denied for a long time?

I agree a police response or similar was sensible for the situations you mentioned, but they didn't rise to the level of national emergency.

I don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion about much of this, but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation. I've personally witnessed many people resigning and giving reasons like "to focus on my family" or "to focus on my health" or something when in reality they were parachuting out before getting fired or were resigning for other reasons but didn't want to burn a bridge by telling the truth. I wouldn't be surprised if being untruthful (or only partially truthful) in resignations is more the norm than is being honest, and when talking about politics that probably goes up even more.

I don't even see a contradiction in the first place. Of course someone who perceives received orders as illegal, and feels strongly enough about it to consider resigning, would "fail to perform" those orders.

My point still stands though and as you say: he was pressured to resign because he wouldn't do what the politicians were demanding of him - which is in line with your "failure to perform" claim.

The actions then done under the Emergencies Act to "clear" the Freedom Convoy from downtown were found to have been illegally invoked.

And you know crime in Ottawa went down during the Freedom Convoy too, right?

Have you put your shoes in the Freedom Convoy participants at all I wonder to balance your perspective? Do you care about the RCMP horses trampling and breaking bones of an elder disabled indigenous woman, who just moments before was basically preaching about love and peace?

I can find that video for you if you'd like, if you haven't seen it.

Otherwise it's not worth it to put anymore of my time to debate this one on one, when I'm responding to someone who tries to support their argument with "when most sources agree" without citing any sources, and where I can predict which sources you'll cite.

At some point they stopped being protestors and became occupiers. There is no Charter right to occupy—as the pro-Palestinian folks also learned [1] (which was simply re-iterating previous precedent, see perhaps [2]).

[1] 2024 ONSC 3755

[2] 2011 ONSC 6862

Did they attack anybody? Obstruct anyone's access to a building they had a right to access?

Or does someone just need to declare that someone is an occupier?

Edit: we've had to warn you about this countless times, and you've continued to break the site guidelines badly, including in other threads than this. I'm not going to ban you right now, just as I haven't banned a different flamewar commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615795), but the same things apply to you as I said to them: this is not ok, and if you don't want to be banned here we need you to fix this once and for all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Presumably when they started setting up residence by not moving their trucks, living in them, and 'importing' fuel supplies into the city:

* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/protesters-say-the...

Or it could have been when they set up saunas and barber shops:

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/ottawa-truck-c...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(IANAL)

They worked with local authorities to position trucks to allow adequate lanes and access to all of downtown.

Ottawa being the capital of Canada, it wasn't the first protest they've had - and so this was all standard practice/protocol for local authorities.

In addition to how absurd that is, I don’t think this would pass any kind of “pub test”.

The Emergencies Act is part of the laws of Canada:

* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act

And there were court orders:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60356461

* 2022 ONSC 1001: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2022/2022onsc1001/2022... ; https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/docs/ISSUE...

And an Act-mandated commission said it was warranted:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Emergency_Commiss...

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rouleau

That is one step removed from Trudeau investigating himself, we're not talking the gold standard of systemic independence here.

The law is a tool for the service of a community, not the other way around.

The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"

I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.

The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.

They switched to camping in front of the parliament with bouncy castles etc.

The bridge that was occupied in another province was cleared.

I'm really not under the impression that at the time they went in there was any emergency. It was ugly: Peaceful unarmed protesters in pedestrian zones with no trucks in sight were pushed back by squads with assault rifles and loud tear gas grenades. People with assault rifles stormed delivery vans.

The narrative at the time was that of a huge "far right" (what a surprise ...) conspiracy. No proof has ever emerged, it was just an abuse of power of the "left" who were at the peak of their power back then.

Good riddance, Trudeau.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613957

The idea that it was a few days of honking then bouncy castles is nonsense. It was an extended occupation of the downtown of the capital. Endless trucks and other vehicles, many with their wheels removed, back-to-back fully blocking a large section of the downtown for weeks. Yes, honking – and loud truck air horns.

There really was chaos downtown, and not the hand-wringing "poop in the street in SF" type. And a lot of it did have right wing vibes. Examples: A well known café had its large window with a LGBTQ illustration smashed. There was while when emergency workers needed escort downtown because of racist abuse. (I was downtown, I heard and saw a ton myself.) Just incredibly dumb stuff: A soup kitchen was intimidated and raided.

And yes, it was financially supported by the "right", including a lot of American money.

Yes, there was a site with bouncy castles and kids playing, but that's obviously not a problem. There's protest in Ottawa all the time, and it's sometimes inconvenient, and that's life in the capital.

The last straw for me wasn't even the chaos in Ottawa, but the protest shutting down the Ambassador bridge in Windsor. That's really bad. Ontario's auto sector is huge, and the perceived reliability and predictability of the flow of intermediate goods across the border is everything to that sector. Interrupting it has an enormous immediate and ongoing economic impact. (I'm not sure where you get your information, but the bridge is also in Ontario.)

None of that is to say that the emergencies act was the right tool. My fairly uninformed impression is that there were tools short of the act that should have been used.

But it's frustrating seeing disinformation and revisioning like this stand. Please reconsider whatever news sources are providing you with this false information.

But I also think it's not an unreasonable point to disagree on. There are cases where we curtail freedom for emergencies. That's just a fact. That doesn't mean believing in authoritarianism. And, especially early in the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about how apocalyptic it was going to be.

Flip side, since the mass vaccination has been incredibly valuable, policies that undermine public trust in vaccination hurt us as a society down the line and the bar should be particularly high for them! It's often said the most valuable tool for epidemiology is public trust.

The whole thing was idiotic. There was already a public discussion about when the vaccine mandate for truck drivers was going to be removed. There was plenty of of ground for more useful discussion.

So, to answer your question:

> So you support abusive authoritarianism

Great question, but no I do not. I think the government overreacted (too coercively). The freedom convoy, however was a real problem that needed ending. If that sounds like abusive authoritarianism to you, I'd invite you to share your opinion about traffic signs, prohibitions against cannibalism, and publicly funded hospitals.

Overwhelmingly Canadian's wanted the vehicles removed - I recall no public empathy. If not, there would have been overwhelming public outcry and a follow up larger movement protest that would have called for no-confidence motion in that moment.

Abusing a law is not by itself unlawful. You always need to actually do something unlawful.

You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.

Was also fine with the 'Occupy Toronto' folks losing their court case: 2011 ONSC 6862.

And as it stands, I live in Toronto, Canada, which does have a conservative government in the province who is doing all sorts of stupid things:

* https://environmentaldefence.ca/2024/11/20/ontario-governmen...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1vT0TmQjs

How many of these were "de-banked"?

Yes, and I live in the same city as well, and I'll agree with you that both Conservatives and Liberals have made things worse for us at different levels of the government.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

How many of the UofT protestors were de-banked? There's a vast difference between having tents removed from a public space, and being cut off from essential parts of modern life. You can't pay insurance with cash. You can't have a regular phone contract. You may not even be able to have home internet. Someone who is debanked effectively becomes a different caste of person, one who is prohibited from most institutions and services.

You're comparing apples to oranges by comparing the treatment of the trucker protests and the campus occupiers.

The Charter is pretty clear on the limitations placed on protests.

If those truckers had dispersed within a day they would have been fine.

But they were accepting donations and foreign money in order to stay encamped and had no intention of dispersing.

(Because banks will already algorithmically drop you as a customer without explanation or recourse, akin to how you can get your Google account algorithimically banned. TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.)

Congratulations, you're in an extremely privileged segment of society. Most of those truckers would likely find it easier to relate to a little green Martian in a flying saucer than to you.

The banks can already choose not to do business with you for any reason or no reason at all. It’s in the pamphlets they give when you open an account.

100s of thousands hospitalised. 60k dead. And that is with lockdowns.

Seems like an emergency to me.

Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.

Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.

I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.

…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.

This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.

Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.

And that is with the biggest lockdowns seen in human history.

It's ridiculous to me that people seem to downplay the severity.

And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.

Many things can be true at once.

Wrong. Here is a meta study which found that 79% of studies determined that lockdowns substantially reduced transmission:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910

And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.

I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.

> shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts

Seems like you should be directing this comment at yourself.

But you know what? Fuck those people. They are wrong. And so are you. None of our response to Covid made any sense at all. The math never made sense. And it never will. All your “science” and “data” amount to nothing but a pile of appeals to authority. And even then it was the layer of tribal politics that really sealed in the multi-year mass hysteria.

Pull your head out of your ass and it’s clear as day. None of it adds up. Sorry. You are quite simply, wrong. Wake up dude. You got tricked. You are wrong.

Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.

Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.

Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?

Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?

Blocking traffic is still blocking traffic, though. In Canada, the "notwithstanding clause" essentially means no rights are absolute. Intentionally blocking traffic on highways here is generally illegal, insofar as people have a lawful right to drive there normally; see e.g. https://mtplaw.com/legal-news/arrests-for-blocking-a-highway... - and generally there will be clear evidence that such blockages are intentional.

Also relevant: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/can-protesters-be-charged-for-bl... ; https://ccla.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Know-Your-Rights... (PDF from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association).

This is a very strong allegation, and one I'd suggest backing up with sources if you want to make it.

Also how 'dangerous' was the convoy perceived to be?

Were the actions of the Government deemed to be overreach?

At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event

After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!

There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.

I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.

It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.

This was implemented in October 2021 and wasn't removed AFAIK until May of 2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

They can protest (which they did) and Justin Trudeau could have picked up the phone and call Biden and ask to remove the restriction, which at that time of the pandemic was completely useless. Instead, Justin Trudeau played politics, he figured it was much better for him to divide the population on the issue than actually work with its biggest trade partner to remove the restriction.

The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.

Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.

The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)

The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.

Is KD unhealthy slop or delicious, and how do you feel about adding hot dogs or other toppings?

It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.

It actually is disgusting, but you and I know it's that good kind of disgusting.

Now ... ketchup on KD... this i cannot let stand

docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Fragment/Te...

your link: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Find this extremely annoying, especially in search results: I want to start at the beginning of the article/post, and not some random place in the middle—which is where the highlighted snippet in the search results are from, but not helpful for learning the larger context.

It also tends to mess up URLS that you may want to copy-paste as it has that text parameter garbage at the end (often with a sizeable amount of text that needs to be removed).

This seems like a pretty big conclusion to reach based on one article and one topic, no? Especially when you, in the same sentence, also recognize that you don't follow Canadian politics?

And an example of where Canada is superior to the US, because the US would've gotten bogged down in even MORE quicksand over freedom and liberty, while the ignoring the freedom of the citizens whose liberty was being infringed on by the truckers.

The handling of the trucker protest is not why he resigned. It is not why he is unpopular.

I think we need to be careful when reading these opinions to not mix up Americans’ views, Russian trolls with legitimate Canadian discourse.

Not necessarily always far-right, but almost obsessively anti-establishment.

> It's a story of everyone going way too far.

> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+

> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.

> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.

> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.

> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)

> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.

> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.

Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.

Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.

I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.

That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?

Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.

What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.

I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.

And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.

Honestly, they were terrorists.

Also if these were left-wing protesters they would have been teargassed and dragged into police vans on day one. Like the G20 in Toronto.

Which I don't hear a peep about from the same people who are wringing their hands about people who threatened the citizens of Ottawa and laid on their horns day and night for weeks.

Furthermore, if these events had happened on the US side of the border, DHS would have had a field day. We had people with guns blocking international borders. How do you all you Americans with your tears about "liberty" think that would have gone over on the US side? Kid gloves were used here in comparison.

I saw NAZI flags and pro-Putin signs all over the place, people defacing monuments, people keeping people up all night on horns, people threatening people walking on the street, cases of assault. Emergency vehicles and hospitals blocked.

It's only because the police refused to do their job, along with the provincial government, that the feds had to intervene.

This was an event that -- like Jan 6 -- was meant to try to take the elected government down. Organized by a group of far right activists who stated as much, and whose interests had nothing to do with truckers as they had organized other convoy events before about totally different issues (pipelines, etc.). And the vast majority of truckers were fine with the situation and the vast majority of the protesters were not "truckers."

I have no sympathy. Downvote away. I don't share in all the handwringing, and I don't believe in a "slippery slope" argument here. I've been on the receiving end of pepper spray and riot police before and I expected it. They should, too.

What we sadly have here, on the anniversary of January 6th, is the tacit acceptance of far right authoritarian putsch attempts as part of our political culture. And that's a disgusting return to the problems from that last century's 20s and 30s.

No one had a pro-Putin sign? Why would they? At that time Putin was sitting at 20m long tables, which should have pleased Fauci himself. Putin was "following the science"!

I'm really opposed to this classic way of mixing an imaginary "far right" with Putin as if they do not have their own grievances.

You are right about the honking, which should have been dealt with more quickly but stopped after an injunction after a couple of days.

Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?

> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point

> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone

Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?

Now it's all "You should be a 51st state" and "Oh your Trudeau is a COMMUNIST and needs to GO!"

Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns

Just... hypothetically. Say this were to happen today? What would be the right way to respond, given what you know of history?

- Wow, for no reason you're glad to see him gone?

people who are geniuses at one thing may be completely out of their depth in other areas

I think this is sadly a demonstration of one of those

Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.

It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)

It shows.