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.
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...
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:
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.
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...