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...]
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.