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.
(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"
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
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.)
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...]
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)
* 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.
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.
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).