Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act
ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com
This feels downright dystopian, especially if the move away from cash and towards centrally-controlled electronic payment systems is anywhere near as widespread in Canada as elsewhere.
Access to most of Ottawa was been cut off, including one of the biggest border crossings in Canada, not a "pizza place". Deploying hyperbole like this isn't helping your case. Surely if the Ambassador Bridge doesn't qualify as critical infrastructure, nothing does.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/marc-miller-path-forward-pr...
These railway blockades forced layoffs, and the CBC also notes that rail carries three times more than what trucks do in Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/rail-shutdown-pro...
Instead, in this case, the Trudeau government met with the protestors and had a process of dialogue that resolved them peacefully after almost a year.
It wasn't the "entire CN rail network" (instead it was the Eastern Canada segment, comprising maybe 15% of CN's network). They don't claim that rail carries three times more than trucks do, but instead simply note that one rail car carries as much as three trucks.
And the blockade lasted approximately 2-3 weeks. Not sure what you mean by "after almost a year".
But let's be clear -- most of Canada was enraged about that. It was hugely expensive to Trudeau politically, and was a tenterhooks [edit - thank you fennec] situation because of the aboriginal file. Yet most of Canada absolutely wanted a stronger response and it hurt Trudeau in the election.
I honestly don't get these "but the rail blockade" or "but some BLM protest in some US city" responses.
It's usually called integrity and honestty
I am ok with BLM blocking infrastructure and disripting things to spread an important message. But we have to give everybody the same ability then.
So as long as it's politically expedient for the sitting PM you would advocate using the emergencies act? Yikes.
Can you point to the part of my post that said that? Anywhere?
Yikes.
Stronger response simply means demanding that police enforce existing laws and injunctions (where injunctions are often simply court orders saying "follow the law") instead of the conciliatory let-it-play-out messaging that Trudeau used at the time. Even in the case of the current protests the emergency act seems unnecessary, and is basically a failure condition for the Ottawa Police basically doing nothing and claiming that they're all out of ideas.
I am saying that during the pandemic for the purposes of restrictions and exceptions, people who worked at grocery stores were "critical workers". It's a big old caution for using words like "critical" which are very vague in order to implement policy assuming it will be used for things you deem to be important, because you do things like that and now there's precedent. Grocery stores are critical infrastructure now so some picket line for a labor dispute at a grocery store is now legally arguably a banned protest.
When opposed to things, people are usually very happy to give away freedoms they don't realize might have adverse consequences in the future.
https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/
> In accordance with this order, the State Public Health Officer has designated the following list of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers to help state, local, tribal, and industry partners as they work to protect communities, while ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.
> Blocking critical infrastructure is illegal
and pointing out that there are an enormous number of things which were labeled critical infrastructure during the pandemic, like any store that sells food.
You’re splitting hairs in an unhelpful way which distracts from the point entirely.
However, enough grocery stores have to be kept running, or else people could run out of food, or the food supply chain could be disrupted.
So, "essential workers" means that they have to be protected and encouraged to work as a group, but that if some individual ones quit or have to take time off work, it will be OK. Whereas in this crisis, if even one grocery store closed, that could, depending on the area, cause a problem.
Edit: changed AT ALL to without a trial because on second thought resized it's possible that there are some legit uses for freezing bank accounts.
The forcing of wearing masks is a tyrannical action, whether it's for a 'good cause' or not.
Some people view the ends do not justify tyrannical means.
A mandate with a good justification is authoritarian but not tyrannical.
Is this something that has precedent in Canada?
We don't have the concept of co-equal branches of government, but the judiciary can declare acts of parliament to violate the charter of rights and freedoms. The Emergencies Act explicitly says it does not supercede any constitutional rights.
Several MPs and MLAs have received suspicious packages: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mike-kelloway-sus...
"Protesters" tried to break into a federal MP's constituency office: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/covid-19-protests...
And that's just Nova Scotia. This isn't as bad as the October Crisis, but it's still quite serious. It's not small potatoes.
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
—-
Under Canadian law, the Liberal government has to put this before both the House of Commons and Senate within 7 days.
Say what? Those two are literally polar opposites. I guess they can be progressive on the social scale and conservative on the economic one, but there's got to be a better name for that.
There’s plenty of areas of this that are misused (see things like civil asset forfeiture), but the overarching strategy of freezing bank accounts isn’t novel or dystopian.
Edit: it’s a bit sneaky to change “AT ALL” to “WITHOUT A TRIAL” without calling out the change.
You can't just have the executive decide they can do that using pure administrative action to seize property. Also, you generally also have to prove in a court of law there was a crime before you can do anything at all.
The US civilian asset forfeiture (and now in Canada too, it seems) are actually quite unique in that regard outside of maybe China (not sure even you can do that there anymore), and at most couple other dystopian very authoritarian nations.
Guess we were all a little asymmetrical with our "reply" button pushes.
That’s it. It’s a time out, not a forfeiture. The Emergency Act is powerful, but this invocation isn’t that powerful.
Is Canada throwing the market efficiency and equity principles baby with the trucker's protest bathwater ?
Oh yeah, letting a bureaucrat freeze assets on an arbitrary basis people's savings and then, eventually, another bureaucrat will unfreeze it.
Rights delayed are rights denied.
Moral is, don’t ignore court orders in democratic countries.
It doesn't exist in the normal course of judicial business, how does it get created here ?
My understanding is that the legal link was created by the Emergencies Act. The government believes that it will be able to calm the situation faster if they can track and cut off the flow of money. This invocation gives the government increased powers to track (they ordered crowdfunding platforms/payment processors to register with FINTRAC). And increased powers to cut off funds (through freezing bank accounts).
Edit:
Here's a relevant quote from Canada's Deputy PM:
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
They created a power of themselves, out of expedience, but there still doesn't seem to be any justification or grounds for it according to the basic principles of the Canadian legal order, except it formally comes from the PM, and he has cops.
They created a false legal reality (grave danger of violence to Canada and its people), which isn't objectively observable, to justify a power to solve that false reality, where in fact they are using it for something else (forcing people to move parked trucks).
They could have just arrested all the truckers for a variety of traffic laws or public-order laws (honking, noise), and then moved the trucks one by one. Instead, Emergency powers...
As my administrative and fiscal law professor taught us, after listing for two weeks all the principles which can be used to craft a law (not Canadian law school, European) :
There's one very old legal principle left, according to which laws are sometimes made, wrongly, but well, that's the real world for you : "I'mma the state, I do it because I can, or I'mma gonna crush you".Due process should be quicker, I wish more people would vote based on making the courts more responsive, but unfortunately no one does.
The trick is to categorize the protest as something else.
The US First amendment has some good language on this: the people have a right to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Imposing a blockade does not qualify. If they just sit in front of Parliament and hold up signs and shout, but don't impede anyone going about their business, then they have a right to make their voices heard.
But what about (some other protest)? Civil rights protesters are usually ordered to disperse after a short time and get arrested if they don't. Sometimes they engage in civil disobedience, but they can be arrested if they do that.
If I go through your post history am I going to see a consistent belief expressed in mid 2020?
https://twitter.com/FrischReport/status/1493344853421436946
They are using terrorism financing laws to execute this.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
1. The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.
2. Resort to terrorizing methods as a means of coercion, or the state of fear and submission produced by the prevalence of such methods.
3. The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation.
I'm sympathetic to (some) of the aims of the protesters but I think they've made their point and should go home. Still, this move by Trudeau seems like an overreaction considering there's been little/no violence.
I think that anyone following closely would have to concede that police conduct and the lack of enforcement is a product of the threat of violence, but I certainly concede that it might be the case that immediate enforcement /might/ result in nonviolent resolution - it just seems very unlikely.
If that's your bar for "violent protest", then it's trivial for anyone to disrupt any protest by injecting interlopers to try to trigger an explosion. There's evidence that undercover police tried to instigate violence and looting in the BLM protests. Couldn't that be happening here too?
I think it is lost on most people not following closely that the day-to-day protest headcount is quite low, easily under 1,000 people, probably well under 500. Any normal crowd control policing unit could disperse such a small group, the police do not do so despite many instances of having done so and clear legal authority to do so.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/photos-climate-strike-...
I would also note that some in this thread are claiming shutting down streets are violence. That protest shut down multiple streets.
Obviously shutting down streets for hours or a day is not "violence" but preventing people from enjoying public roadways for 17+ days in their own neighbourhood is a violation of their liberities. Just the same a single day horn-honking protest would not be the same as weeks unending.
But language-lawyering about the word "violence" isn't really the point anyway, this is more about the right to protest being in tension with the rights of nearby residents and workers to live peacefully.
At what point does shutting down a street go too far? 1 day, 2 days, a week? It seems somewhat arbitrary to me, and that is what I was trying to convey. I think any obstruction of a road is an inconvenience. Does that mean it is too much of a tension and is causing me to not be able to live peacefully? I don't think so.
I would also say that the point of the protest is to inconvenience people. If the truckers blocked roads in the middle of the Yukon nobody would care. The reason they are doing it in Ottawa is because it is capital and because it is populated.
I guess I wouldn't have as much of an issue if there was a clear standard, but as far as I can tell there isn't.
I think OWS is a good example, they got a lot of publicity and staged long term protests and demonstrations that indeed inconvenienced people, in a two month occupation there certainly was some disruption but I would invite you to compare the two events closely and I think you will see that this Ottawa situation is quite different both in the level of disruption and the quantity of arrests.
Of course in Canada we have lots of great examples of roads being blocked in isolated areas because of logging and pipeline protests, they draw a lot of the comparisons because despite their impact being very limited in terms of the people effected they are cleared out much more violently than has occurred in any instance here. Fairy Creek is something you can look into, the RCMP happily arrested journalists covering the protest crackdown in a gross violation of civil liberties and the rule of law.
I think if your impression of the protests in Ottawa is that they have simply "shut down a street" you should look into it in more detail. (For example the mayor tried to negotiate a deal to get the trucks to stop overnighting and honking in residential areas but failed to get it to stick, that's not related to blocking off one street downtown.) I know a few people that have been hassled on the street in a manner that resulting in them regarding the area unsafe and not a public space for them anymore.
The trucker protest, on the other hand, I can understand what it is supposed to do. Make people uncomfortable, block critical infrastructure, force the government to do what you want. But, if truckers just leave, then we're back to "What's the point of this?"
If the point of a protect is go 'get your way', it's essentially a crappy "Might makes right" play. Might as well not vote, ignore all the rules etc. Society doesn't work if you pick-and-choose at scale.
Now, you can say "The trucker protest isn't as important as civil rights" but that's just a "You shouldn't be protesting" argument. Racists thought civil rights protesters shouldn't be protesting too. If the protesters believe their cause is actually important then it makes sense to protest. But, it only makes sense to protest in ways that are likely to result in changes. Symbols are fine, but empty symbolism isn't enough for something you think is really important.
Something has gone wrong though with this trucker protest because people should have already been arrested. LBJ wasn't granting himself power to deal with civil rights protests.
IMO now it is going to turn into some kind of Canadian Reichstag fire.
Some headline like 2/3rds of Canadians want the government to make sure there is never another Reichstag fire is just a matter of time.
For most of us COVID is like a cold or at worse a flu if not vaccinated, and likely absolutely nothing if you are vaccinated. So the need to force people to get vaccinated is pointless because they’re only harming themselves, but it’s their own damn choice.
Clown world.
Imagine someone honking their horn at your bedroom window all night because they wanted a McFlurry but "the machine was broken".
If all a protest does is mess with society, it'll just end up with counter-protests and civil war light edition.
There's no guarantee of due process in Canada's constitution?
The whole protest has been illegal from the start (violating the highway traffic act)
> Last week they arrested an old man for merely honking his horn to show support.
Source? Either way, yes, there was an injunction granted specifically against honking horns.
> So, anyone attending a protest is joining an illegal activity...and can have their accounts frozen.
No, anyone attending this specific protest at this specific time when there is a provincial state of an emergency (and now the invoking of the federal emergencies act, which requires provincial assent) is joining an illegal activity, and anyone providing monetary support to said illegal activity may have their accounts frozen.
> There's no guarantee of due process in Canada's constitution?
There is indeed. The Emergencies Act is subject to the charter of rights and freedoms, section 7 of which covers legal rights[1] and section 1 of which lays out how these rights are subject to "such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". It'll be up to the courts to decide after the fact whether these restrictions were demonstrably justified (hint: with the province declaring the protest illegal, declaring a state of emergency last week, and the protesters totally refusing to move: they will be found justified. Our court system is not nearly as politicized as our southern neighbours')
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...
Man arrested for honking
He appears to have been arrested for refusing to identify himself when stopped (it looks like he was intending to, then emboldened by the cameraman opted not to). That's bog standard highway traffic act stuff - if you're stopped driving, you have to show your license, registration and proof of insurance if asked.
To say "arrested for honking" feels misleading - it seems reasonable to suggest that if he followed standard Highway Traffic Act stuff he would have been on his way with a warning/ticket/whatever is done presently to stop the honking, doesn't it? I'm open to have misunderstood, I'm not even qualified to be an armchair lawyer.
But you might be better served to first examine the reasons why so many Canadians are in favour of various restrictions that have been introduced (and eventually once again withdrawn), by every party and every level of government in the last two years. It's mostly because we have much more faith than our American counterparts that our institutions will do what's right for all Canadians.
What about an online petition or a bake sale?
Less sarcastically: there are frequently situations in which a majority may democratically decide to make a minority behave in a certain way. I think it is relatively clear from opinion polls that a majority of Canadians do not agree with the behavior of the truckers. So writing to an MP or running for parliament will probably be a fruitless strategy. Hence the protests.
It would be trivial to find unpleasant, widely-condemned situations in which you and I would probably be united in our opposition.
The difficulty comes when the minority being forced to behave in a certain way are non-appealing in some way. Democracies need to find a way of dealing with them. It will be horse-trading, negotiation, cajoling, appealing and arguing.
None of those strategies were applied by the Trudeau government before they became hysterical and tried to claim they were having a Canadian version of Jan 6th.
I am certain that many Canadians both do not agree with the apparent demands of the truckers and simultaneously do not agree with the application of the Emergencies Act.
I found this podcast interesting: three interviews with people who were doxxed as donors. I disagreed with the first two, but the third one seemed like a very sane person: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/756-how-i-ended-up-suppor...
Getting these people off the street isn't authoritarianism, it's preventing the inmates from running the asylum.
Can't you make a distinction with the bridge blockade and the rest?
To me the Canadian government doesn't look authoritarian, it looks weak. For weeks you have people threatening public order as well as public health. To accommodate this implies that a minority can intimidate the majority of the population and legitimate authority through use of force.
> violating the highway traffic act
Show me the man, and I'll find you a crime. Seriously man, what the fuck is the "Highway Traffic Act."
> an injunction granted specifically against honking horns
Let's simply declare a benign activity that people do thousands of times per day in every city, illegal!
> this specific protest at this specific time
But also, you better not show up at similar protests at other times either
> provincial state of an emergency
Yep, the blanket "emergency declaration" that makes virtually everything we don't like, illegal
> joining an illegal activity
because we just declared whatever you are doing to be illegal
> anyone providing monetary support to said illegal activity may have their accounts frozen
so you don't have to be a protester to be engulfed by this, just offering $5 so someone can get a coffee means you could have your accounts frozen. Cast a wide net, indeed!
> It'll be up to the courts to decide after the fact
Yes, by judges who are appointed by Canada's federal government!
Isn't there a court order forbidding that? Ignoring court orders is a crime and there is plenty of due process around that.
Managed to hurt him too.
Imagine being in law enforcement. Coming home to your family and brag about how you physically hurt an old man and bullied him out of his constitutional rights.
And this is entire event has been orchestrated by "people with power" with a political agenda which is hostile to most of the population.
It has almost exactly zero organic content. No amount of rhetoric and gaslighting is going to change that.
> The top donation, $215,000, has a comment that says “processed but not recorded.” The next top donation, at $90,000, is listed as from Thomas M. Siebel. CTV News has reached out to the American billionaire by the same name but has not confirmed it is his donation.
Those standards being "billionaires donated, therefore illegitimate" as far as I can tell.
This is the first I'm hearing of this. Which neighborhoods were burned to the ground?
In Portland Oregon, BLM spray painted buildings, burnt many things in the middle of the road and sidewalks, destroyed property, physically assaulted, broke windows, and ripped down bus stops and statues. They formulated an incursion into a state building putting the lives of Oregon's law officers in jeopardy (Molotov cocktails throw at them).
Depending on your persuasion, you might argue some justification occurred in Minneapolis Minnesota. But there are clearly limits when destruction of property and looting fall far outside of any tenuous reflection of social unrest. (Target?)
Seattle Washington was worse. Much much worse. The city directed their police force to yield a central block of the city to armed rebellion. People, one as I recall completely innocent, were shot and killed.
There was not the immediacy nor the widespread arrests to match the level of violence and destruction in these three locations. In terms of accuracy and spirit I believe you have missed the mark in your description of action and response.
There have been some good points in this thread otherwise and I'm still thinking about them. But you would be better served by re-evaluating your position on this topic.
Mid-level police commanders unilaterally decided to abandon the precinct, which allowed CHAZ to form. Not “the city,” and not in the face of “armed rebellion.”
(Yes, there were guns and unfortunate violence later: after the police left. Their job is maintaining public order; they failed.)
https://theoryreader.org/2021/03/30/french-philosopher-miche...
Here is a more conservative one (yet still, the essay is very good), which also brings up how he knowingly spread HIV to young men in San Francisco:
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1993/3/the-perversions-of-m-...
BLM arose from several extrajudicial murders by police after a history of racism and mistreatment by the state. The trucker protest is essentially about commerce policy in an already very heavily regulated industry. It's hard to imagine other similar jobs where mandating your hours of sleep is discussed by a federal legislature (possibly international treaty too?).
The perspective is important because these are obviously not the same thing.
> The inquiry launched by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s government into the scale of foreign funds aimed at damaging the province’s oil and gas industry has issued its long-awaited report, finding that foreign donors provided nearly $1.3 billion in funds for Canadian environmental campaigns between 2003 and 2019.
There were BLM protests in Canada.
Europe is opening up. I guess Science different in Canada.
But its not Gov following science, at best it's Gov following sentiment. People are right fed up of the overreach and want no more rules around masks, passports and lockdowns. There's no more tolerating restrictions for something that's a minor cold, can be vaccinated against if you are worried or early treated with antiviral using both new and repurposed drugs.
The restrictions have already been poised to be lifted on the strength of said advice. This was already on the horizon and one can only imagine that protestors purposefully decided to move on this on the tail end of these policies.
With that being said, how do you get noticed? I remember there was a Wall Street protest of some kind right after the crash. They sat quietly in parks and protested because people got annoyed when they were "inconvenienced" when they protested outside buildings. Their protests fizzled out and was forgotten. Even though large swathes of people were pissed off with Wall Street.
Back in college, we had a protest. Few people from the media were there and we were protesting on campus, doing it "right". The media people were like "go do something...we cannot cover a bunch of college kids sitting around!"
Unfortunately protests(the ones you agree with and the ones your disagree with) run by smaller groups are going to get noticed only when they do "illegal" things.
The reason they fizzled is they had absolutely zero marketing experience. When they finally got down to listing their demands, it was a 43 point manifesto from save the penquins to truther investigations.
BLM really didn’t get anywhere (they initially had a ~14 point demands) until someone came up with “Defund!”. Marketers would get you down to 2 or 3 items, but two syllables was brilliant.
Someone in this thread mentioned "civil disobedience" movements. Studying the history of such movements (anti-apartheid politics, workers movements, womens rights, anti-colonial struggles), we quickly realize although having a mass of non-violent protesters (popular support) is important, the actual balance of power lies with more militant groups putting actual pressure (sabotage, blockages, attacks) on our overlords to change things for the better.
That sounds pretty healthy. I mean, having a central authority deciding for everyone else is precisely what's wrong with our society.
It also doesn't help to keep a unified front when you have many people injured/traumatized/incarcerated due to police actions (political repression). So while i agree the Occupy movement was a colossal failure, i don't agree with your interpretation of why.
I don't think that is true. I've personally witnessed several major movements in France which involved literally millions of people on the streets, some of which were successful and some not. Let's look over the past 20 years:
- the anti-CPE movement (CPE was a reform for quasi-slave labor for people fresh out of studies) won after months of intense and violent struggle (think molotov cocktails) and university occupations
- the national suburbs riots of 2005 (caused by cops murdering two kids, and Sarkozy raging racist discourse) failed after weeks of intense and violent struggle ; nothing changed except some people were jailed
- in 2010-2011, the protests against retirement reform gathered over a million people every week and the government was on the verge of collapse (we no longer has gas in the petrol stations) yet the movement was never very violent, the government never ceded and so the movement lost
- in 2016, millions of people demonstrated and blockaded for months against working law reform, yet Macron (at the time "socialist" minister of economy) passed it without a vote (article 49-3 of the constitution allows the government to bypass the parliament, and it had not been used in decades) ; this was the first mass movement after the State of emergency (2015) and we can see the fascist cops were on free wheels as we started getting serious life-threatening injuries at every demo even in smaller cities
- in 2018, with the gilets jaunes, despite approval by a vast majority of the population and the protests spreading to even the tiniest countryside cities for over a year and half, the movement failed as it was teargased/grenaded/batoned to hospital (or to death, as with Zineb Redouane) and MANY people were either jailed for extensive periods of time or crippled for life
All of these protests i've noted had very clear objectives and were very massive. Some succeeded, some not. What's the difference between those cases? The only difference is the decisions by the government and the amount of blood they were willing to spill. If you want to know what kind of blood spilling i'm talking about, there's a gilets jaunes collection here: TRIGGER WARNING http://lemurjaune.fr/
On the other hand, studying the history of political repression gives us much clearer ideas on how/why social movements can succeed or fail. The fact that INTERPOL started with a "international police conference on the peril of anarchism" for example, or early collaboration between french/russian/american services to hunt down radical troublemakers. Or the Church committee investigation about FBI's COINTELPRO. Or in France, the many post-WWII scandals involving pro-nazi police prefects (like Maurice Papon who ordered to kill and deports hundreds-to-thousands of algerians in a single week of october 1961). Or the fascist militias organized by De Gaulle (Services d'Action Civique) to attack May 68 demos. Or... and the list goes on.
Modern States have spend considerable resources on counter-insurgency strategies because that's how they hold power. Whether opposition movements have a common purpose is irrelevant as long as the State has the powers and is willing to cripple or kill a significant portion of the demonstrators should their organizing start to be effective.
They flopped because they had no plan. Even today, you can’t come up with any concrete thing/legislation they wanted.
The masters of Wall Street didn’t have to lift a finger.
> The masters of Wall Street didn’t have to lift a finger.
No, because they had their obedient militia (the police) teargas, beat up and arrest everyone for them. And the media to spew lies along the lines of "we don't know what these people want" because their desires can't be confined in a single bill/reform.
These people wanted what Barack Obama promised and denied them: hope and change. Food & housing & healthcare for free for all. Putting an end to racial policing. Etc. They were met with rubber bullets and detention. And now clueless people like you who were not on the ground (i personally was involved with other Occupy movements in Europe at the same time) now judge them based on State/corporate propaganda.
That's pretty representative of any form of collective organizing defying the status quo. The civil rights activists of the 60s in the USA were equally derided by the media and repressed by the police in their day, just like the gilets jaunes of today's France.
Thanks for so eloquently making my point that they had no plan.
> clueless… who were not on the ground
Best of luck with projection and raging about conspiracies on the internets.
You've mentioned "conspiracy theory" twice now. What's a conspiracy theory about what i said? Are you implying police/political repression does not exist and we all live in a free and democratic society? Or something else entirely?
Doing illegal stuff to get attention only makes me less supportive of any cause, personally, whether it's lefty or righty bullshit - I don't like this, I didn't like the Jan 6 riots, and I don't like a lot of what I saw from BLM, Occupy Wall Street, and many others over the years. Even if I agreed with a few of the underlying demands or issues (I'm against vax mandates, I do think Derek Chauvin should be in prison, there was a ton of bank fraud in the 00s and high level people should have been jailed, etc).
Emergency powers weren't invoked in 2020 when Canada's railways were blocked for months. In fact, at the time Trudeau was quoted saying things like "Politicians should not be telling the police how to deal with protesters"
The double standards in this country are staggering at times.
...Now the fact a bunch of donors are American and not Canadian is... Fascinating...
I'm not sure what to do about that little chestnut... Sorry Canada. Welcome to politics by free trade I guess???
>I'm not sure what to do about that little chestnut... Sorry Canada. Welcome to politics by free trade I guess???
That'd make sense if they were only freezing the funds that were received from outside the country, but according to the article they're freezing the accounts of "anyone linked with the protests".
Taking a second look through the media coverage, I've gotta laugh though... To think that your Federal capital should be immune from a glorified sit in, and to go and make a big fluff about demanding to "take it back"
...Yet no moment of reflection in this is a symbolic gesture to the people of Ottawa on what the Federal mandates have taken from the protestors. It's like people are shouting completely past one another. It's one of the most sublime examples of dysfunction writ large I've lived through to date.
Sad that...
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread [1], I recommend taking a look at this channel or other extended livestreams to get a view from the ground if your impression of this event has been mostly shaped by articles. That recommendation goes for all major protests, especially if you think you disagree with the people protesting.
Don't get me wrong I like his videos but I also like hearing from the other side for good measure. Perhaps it is pedantic to point out that everyone has a political leaning but I think it is good to be upfront so that people can consider the biases of the input in order to make a more informed opinion. Or perhaps others should gauge the political bias themselves? That's a question of philosophy and ethics. I wish that everyone had enough skepticism and critical thinking to question everything and be conscious of their measures of validity and invalidity.
Edit: As I note in the linked comment, this channel is openly supportive of the protests. As I also write there, a quick YouTube search will yield a large variety of other sources. The important thing is finding sources with long and unedited footage. As Jacques Ellul observed, "propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins." (This seems to be the primary driver of interest in long-form podcasts.)
I chose to share a channel with a positive bias because 1.) in my view Frei does a respectable job engaging counter-protestors with opposing views and 2.) in my view, mainstream coverage of this skews more negative than is warranted based on having watched many hours of livestream footage.
*edit: Ironically I've been rate limited and can't continue this conversation, lmao
So how… how would a moderation log and strict policies make HN a better place?
Given:
1) HN was started by / is moderated by "computer nerds" (IMO you're hardcore if you write it in lisp)
2) 'dang' is the only acknowledged public moderator (some small? number of additional secret moderators also exist)
It follows that:
It's difficult and doesn’t scale to "manually" apply rate limiting. Most / all such action is highly automated.
At least that's my wild, possibly way-off-base guess.
This doesn't happen to me often, but does happen when I comment in rapid succession.
The edit button is still not showing up for me, though. Do you have any idea why that might be or if there's something I can do to fix it?
Imgur screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/ZEWIJeW
Edit: Was there a thread-level edit ban or something? Because I can now edit this post.
Users flagged that comment.
I blame the big media for sowing so much division because they flatout refuse to write a positive story about the other side.
https://youtube.com/user/DCNews2Share
What ever the YouTube channel attribute flag to throttle visibility is, is probably set to max as they never get more than a few hundred views.
Ottawa Walks: https://www.youtube.com/c/Ottawalks/videos
Pre-convoy this user was just doing walking live streams around the city.
I am all for demonstrating, but I think it is a little ridiculous what they are doing.
My personal opinion: your threshold to kill free speech is way, WAY too low.
Anyone here with on the ground experience about the nighttime situation?
Perhaps reading the comment in context of the comment chain is necessary. I am making no claims as to the truckers, I am stating that the onus is on those who are causing damage by their "Free Speech" to adjust to avoid causing that damage, rather than on the people suffering the damage.
Took 5s to find.
Look at how casually you make these connections: speech -> noise -> sleeplessness -> damage ... therefore implying, purposefully or not, that speech = violence.
No. Speech is NOT violence. I suggest you get a pair of earplugs.
Sadly, I doubt you even recognise your contribution to the polarisation of society and removal of nuance from social discourse.
> No. Speech is NOT violence. I suggest you get a pair of earplugs.
Threats. That's one form of violence. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, that's another.
Threat is instigating fear of injury. Violence is causing injury. You can have your own personal definition, but from a legal perspective, threat is not a violent crime.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't even illegal. Let alone a violence. Inciting panic is illegal. If you incite panic through yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre, you'll answer for inciting panic and will bear responsibility for the actual consequences, if any, not for the yelling.
https://dictionary.thelaw.com/violence/
this violence is not confined to an actual assault of the person, [..] whatever goes to intimidate or overawe, by the apprehension of personal violence, or by fear of life [..] equally falls within its limits
Instead, read a little further: The term “violence” is synonymous with “physical force,” and the two are used interchangeably, in relation to assaults
Speech is not physical force, and is not an assault, and is not violence.
It doesn't have to be either one or the other. A more conciliatory approach by the Canadian government would pay off better. My personal opinion, only. I might be wrong, who knows?...
I cannot have a festival out on my lawn for similar reasons...
This whole thread is people arguing about something they evidently know nothing about.
Free speech has nothing to do with it.
If that is the only type of demonstration that gets your point across, ok, but I seriously doubt that is the case.
Unless Trudeau does that, and god forbid show some humility, this will not end good for Canada.
In what way will this "not end good for Canada"?
Most likely the blockades will be shut down and everyone else will be able to get on with life.
"Most likely the blockades will be shut down and everyone else will be able to get on with life."
Except for all people who can't because they got unlucky in the vaccine lottery, like Maddie de Garay:
https://thecovidblog.com/2021/07/08/maddie-de-garay-ohio-13-...
Note: de Garay is a child. Zero benefit from Covid vaccines to her or anyone else. It's bad enough when parents submit their children for medical experimentation like that, but when governments force them to do so it's even worse.
Well I can see you're not interested in things like facts, evidence, science or reality. Never mind then.
An absolute handful of children have been (possibly; causality unclear) sickened by the COVID-19 vaccine.
About 1,000 children have died of COVID-19 in the US (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...).
The exact details of why the virus hits children less hard are unclear; one theory is that the primary cause of lung-failure death in adults is a cytokine storm (i.e. the immune system reacting to the virus by attacking too many healthy cells at a rate the body can't repair), and a younger, more naive immune system is less likely to have picked up whatever environmentally-primed triggers COVID-19 aggravates to kick off a cytokine storm.
... but sadly, "less likely" isn't "didn't happen," and if that causality is correct, some thousand unlucky kids have gotten snake-eyes on the immune dice and died of a disease that we can now vaccinate for. That's an order of magnitude more children than the number we even suspect of being sickened by the vaccine.
We should vaccinate those who haven't been vaccinated because the risk balance is pretty clear at this point from the gross numbers we have on under-18 vaccination already.
from your source:
> COVID-19 deaths are those with confirmed or presumed COVID-19
i.e. 1000 children have died with COVID, not of COVID. Big difference.
1 - https://youtu.be/pcGsqLRyKo0?t=67
2 - https://givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022
If you can't even describe the situation accurately, why should anyone care about your take on it?
Of the ~90k GiveSendGo donors, ~35k were from Canada. Population: 36-38m.
Here's one of the top donors confirming their entry was accurate: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/nb-sussex-corne...
This doesn't look like public discontent, it looks like a small group of motivated contrarians and their international backers.
You know what looks like public discontent? The public coming together to stop trucks disrupting their lives and their city - https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/battle-of-billings...
And none of this answers the question about how this will "not end good for canada".
I don't have the right to go lay on my horn outside your house, and for good reason.
If not, then maybe not the most unbiased source of information.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blocka...
After all, extremists either left or right, terrorists and criminals have been doing that for years on Signal.
The rest of the truckers will have to obtain a proof of vaccination BEFORE they are aloowed to drive their trucks again.
Ottawa residents aren’t forced to live in that city.
Why not do the obvious thing: send the police in to arrest people who won't leave. Tow their trucks. That worked at the border the other day -- why wouldn't it work in Ottawa too? It's not like the Canadian police haven't dealt with large protests in the capital before.
If that approach doesn't work, then it might make sense use emergency powers. But why go straight to emergency powers without trying to clear people out the normal way?
For me the main takeaway from the protests so far is that the Canadian police are either afraid to, or unwilling to, enforce the law, and the government at all levels is afraid to make the police do their jobs.
They claimed they didn't have enough manpower and needed help from the provincial and federal governments.
Why they were so poorly prepared when the convoy was broadcasting its intentions in advance is a great question, but it also doesn't help now.
The Ottawa Police Service abandoned the people of the city for weeks and now can't resolve the problem on its own.
So I guess the answer to "why go straight to emergency powers without trying to clear people out the normal way?" is because the people whose job it was to handle this the normal way raised the white flag about 24 hours in and haven't done much about it since.
This is not correct. The Ottawa police have repeatedly said that they're ready to arrest anyone breaking the law but currently it is not illegal to park in public roads with trucks and the truck drivers are mostly abiding by all laws. Less than half a dozen people have been arrested because there's no laws being broken.
The reason they are not doing any enforcement is because they have no legal authority to kick out the bulk of the protestors.
Fireworks in the downtown core nightly. Air horns for days on end. Harassment, assaults and intimidation targeted towards minorities or those wearing a mask. Public urination, defication.
Even “it’s not illegal to park on public roads” is false because they’re parked across all lanes, blocking north/south access to several blocks.
Enforcement is non existent. The police are so afraid of escalating what are clearly a volatile group that they’ve opted to arrest only when it’s unavoidable. Whether or not that I keeping a lid on the situation is up for debate, but what isn’t up for debate is that laws are being broken and it’s making life hell for residents.
Oh, also, three days ago protestors jammed the emergency lines with phony calls. It would ring until the line disconnected. It’s a miracle no deaths were directly attributed to this.
As noted in the release, blocking a public road the way they've been doing seems to be a violation of section 423(g) of the Criminal Code: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-423.ht...
Note that the Criminal Code defines "highway" as "a road to which the public has the right of access, and includes bridges over which or tunnels through which a road passes."
There's also mischief - section 430(1)(c): https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-430.ht...
They've certainly interfered with Centretown residents' lawful enjoyment of their property.
Not to mention Highway Traffic Act violations. Plus other Criminal Code violations for the train horns (and while we're at it, even by-law violations). The reality is that the Ottawa Police have had plenty of tools at their disposal but have chosen not to. I don't mean to blame the individual officers - I've seen quite a few of them on the live streams trying their best. I see it more as a failure of leadership.
And I get that during a protest, it's better for police to err on the side of not nailing people for every infraction they can. But it seems like they have the tools to do a lot of than they've done - and have had these tools available since the beginning.
Also, in fairness - it could be they have intel about weapons like the ones the RCMP seized at the Alberta blockade today. That would explain their reluctance, and would mean they are really stuck between a rock and a hard place because if they step up enforcement and kick off an armed conflict, they'll get blamed for that, too. So it might be a bit of a no-win situation.
But if that's the case, it's not very visible from the outside - making the whole situation understandably frustrating for citizens who feel like they are paying $350mil a year and not getting enough protection in return.
The police have begged repeatedly for people to report lawbreaking to them so they can arrest more people.
Train horns in residential areas, let alone at night, are against the law. Harassment is against the law. Parking vehicles in intersections is against the law. Do I need to go on? Stop pretending this isn't what residents are taking issue with, no one gives a fuck about protesting in and of itself.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-423.ht...
Highway, in this context, means any public road.
Early on, you could maybe argue you came to protest and there was really nowhere else to park. But after a few days, given the convoy's stated intent was to shut down Ottawa, it's difficult to argue that you're not trying to make residents abstain from their lawful right to drive down Kent St. or Wellington St if you're still blocking the roads when there are plenty of other places you could park and then walk or bus to the hill to protest.
Here they are around 11pm last night: https://youtu.be/bZ6d2rnUvi8?t=1988
Plenty of truck horns, a train horn, and someone continually engaging his Jake brake. There are apartments 50 meters away on Sparks St. And if memory serves, there are plenty more on Queen St. close enough to be kept awake by that much noise at that time of night. It's difficult to see how that's not depriving residents of lawful enjoyment of their property.
That's an indictable offense, which makes it an arrestable offense as per the code:
495 (1) A peace officer may arrest without warrant
(a) a person who has committed an indictable offence or who, on reasonable grounds, he believes has committed or is about to commit an indictable offence;
I realize this isn't what you want, but the law means what it says, not what you think it should mean. If you want to change it, you're free to run for political office.
But on that note, a big issue we face is that while anyone can decide to run for election in theory, in practice it's way, way easier to become an MP if you're already wealthy and can afford to take the time away from work to run a successful campaign.
So in reality, running to become a member of Parliament is least accessible to those whose voices need to be heard to most. I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think that harassing your fellow citizens to try and blackmail the government into doing what you want is the way to go.
If I left my car parked in the middle of the road in Ottawa it would be towed within a couple of hours. It's complete bullshit that there are no laws for the police to enforce.
Some of the reasons listed as to the reluctance of towing companies to participate: - the heavy truck towing companies get much of their business from the truck industry. If these towing companies were to tow away these heavy trucks, they may lose much of that business. - many of the towing companies support the freedom convoy and their participants - fear of violence against tow truck operators if they try to tow away these trucks
see https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-protest-truck-t...
the police and government had ample time to prepare for the protest.
They should have restricted vehicle access near Parliament Hill once they heard the protesters were heading to Ottawa.
There must be day to day things disrupted enough that someone's job has been disrupted with this all going on that can be reallocated to this.
also from the CBC article, excerpts:
====
While the city likely has some vehicles with heavy-duty towing capacity for large OC Transpo vehicles, they also did not provide a response when asked how many they had.
Hooking up a commercial truck to a heavy-duty tower — sometimes called a "wrecker" — takes at least 30 minutes, Whan said.
It also takes time to tow the trucks to wherever they're being relocated to, and if the City of Ottawa did attempt it, they'd need to find a sizable space to put them.
Police don't think towing the trucks is an effective solution, said Matt Skof, president of the Ottawa Police Association.
"You can tow all you want — they're just going to return to the location, so it hasn't resolved the issue," Skof said. "And where are you putting all these vehicles?"
====
“This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people? Over 80% of the population of Quebec have done their duty by getting the shot. They are obviously not the issue in this situation.”- this is according to this article: https://thepulse.one/2022/01/03/prime-minister-justin-trudea...
The bureaucratic state can freeze your bank account, revoke your license, and shut down your life, all remotely.
And now they've set precedent for future protests. I don't know how anyone who considers themselves a liberal or Leftist can support this.
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/anonymous-donations-to-convoy-as-...
Assuming both police force (as many minorities have experienced) and administrative force can be abused, is one worse for society or more susceptible to abuse?
"Let me remind you, Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue. We’ve reached out through multiple means to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns. This is a moment for all of us to pull together,"Justin Trudeau said.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/situation-is-concern...
That said, it was predominantly farmers from 1 state. may be 3-4 states max. India has like 28 states.
Short of the hong-kong protests, I don't think there were any recent protests that has double-digit percent attendance numbers. For instance, wikipedia says that for the BLM protests, "between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in U.S. history". That means, the largest protest in the US only has between 4.6%-7.9% attendance.
edit: whoops forgot link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
Also, unlike Trudeau's mandates which had questionable backing from the constitution, the Farm Bill was passed by a Democratic Govt. with the necessary popular mandate.
The Federal Governme t has almost no control over, well, anything related to health, or covid related mandates.
The provinces rule here.
The truckers had issues with border crossings, and that's federal, one rare area the feds handle here.
So in reality, the last federal election had very little to do with mandates, or validation of mandate response.
More about fiscal response.
That said, I find this protest a bit loopy. Only provinces can revoke mandates, which they created, about closed businesses, masks, vaccines, etc. They're literally protesting the wrong government.
The protests in India lasted over a year with several rounds of talks despite being in the midst of a worse wave of covid than now, yet they didn't resort to using their equivalent of these powers.
It really does make India's democracy look stronger than Canada's.
I am familiar with the protests in India but I did not see any that occupied the downtown of a major city for weeks on end or choked off the most important transport link in the country for over a week. I welcome more information on that front. My view is that if the parade on 26 January 2021 had remained in the city for weeks then it might be somewhat similar, but as it stands that is not my impression.
I didn't keep up with the farmer's protests too closely, but I do recall that at the time there were reports that the govt was having trouble distributing aid in the midst of a big wave of the delta variant in part due to the blocking of roads and trains by the protests (although of course it wouldn't be surprising if that was just blame shifting), going off of Wikipedia however, it does look like several routes to the capital were blocked for a while, along with some news outlets reporting up to ~$7B in economic loss due to associated supply chain disruptions: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
I personally just find it disappointing that Trudeau seemingly hasn't even tried to talk things out, so invoking this act feels pretty excessive considering how egregious the circumstances were in previous uses. Regardless of whether or not he's willing to compromise (or if the truckers can even be reasoned with), I feel that this act should have been a measure of absolute last resort.
The Act has never been invoked before, the predessessor was scrapped because it was considered excessive. Even under these powers the Feds cannot directly order police to do anything.. it is pretty weak in terms of action on the ground unless the military shows up.
The federal government has been begging the OPS and the province to act, IMO they have run out of options precisely because the folks that should be dealing with this want the federal government to "own" it and now they got their wish. There didn't seem to be many resorts left!
Rather weak mandate.
This is not some pre-covid majority exploiting an old mandate like the Ford or Kenney provincial governments, yours is a very weak argument.
The protests were seen by Pakistan's ISI and other Indian separatists group as an opportunity to show Indian government was some kind of tyrant, when in reality the government showed exceptional patience with absolutely vile protestors who raped women and chopped off arms of people with no consequence.
As an Indian I am glad with whatever is happening to Trudeau. If you are going to shelter and support people trying to hurt other countries, those societies will hurt you back.
So, for instance, no gay pride demonstration was ever a legitimate protest?
Some revolutions were carried out by less than that percentage.
I should clarify that I don't mean to say that this makes the protest valid, just that the argument that protest is only acceptable if an arbitrary number of people are involved is not all that good.
10% of people oppose nearly everything and it isn't tyranny so, unless you're an anarchist, your point is ridiculous.
I think this quote from Tocqueville explains it well: "So what is a majority taken as a whole, if not an individual who has opinions and, most often, interests contrary to another individual called the minority. Now, if you admit that an individual vested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why would you not admit the same thing for the majority? Have men, by gathering together, changed character? By becoming stronger, have they become more patient in the face of obstacles?"
What matters is not how many supporters each side has but what the merits and demerits of each side are.
And who decides that? It's either going to be a tyrannical minority, a tyrannical majority or a literal tyrant according to those who oppose the decision.
You could argue that consent, as traditionally understood, doesn't even meaningfully exist in a population above a certain threshold (say 10^6). Consent implies knowledge and understanding, in a population of 10^6 and up, in even a moderately complex environment, there is no way even 1/10 of the population understand more than their own very narrow slice of what their environment and society are doing.
Statistically people from 1-3 states can't represent the majority of farmers.
>supported small farmers for decades
I guess they therefore can't ever stop subsidizing them, homerun for the economy.
>agriculture is like 80% of jobs for ppl in India
What? (Also, it produces almost no value in exchange for the subsidies, it's barely 15% of the GDP IIRC)
The right to protest ends when it infringes on other's rights to go about their daily life. Occupying highways and roads for months on end is not a peaceful protest.
Canadian politicians, including some in the cabinet, supported violent protests in India. Canadian citizens fueled money to the protests in India.
What is inherently violent in those actions?
Most everyone is willing to tolerate a couple days of protests. Where it gets beyond peaceful is when you’re making a huge amount of noise at all hours of the day for weeks on end. That isn’t peaceful, it’s obviously disruptive to the point of intolerability. It’s abusing our willingness to tolerate protest.
What, specifically, about this protest is not peaceful - in the context of protests?
> Most everyone is willing to tolerate a couple days of protests.
If you only protest so long as people are willing to tolerate it, I don't see the point of protesting at all. Could you imagine how society would look today if emancipation protestors packed it up and went home after a few days?
> That isn’t peaceful, it’s obviously disruptive to the point of intolerability.
If being disruptive isn't the point of a protest, what is?
Semi trucks blaring their horns at 3am in the middle of a city for a week straight.
> If you only protest so long as people are willing to tolerate it, I don't see the point of protesting at all.
You have to expect that after 2 weeks of constant disruption, something has to give. Despite the fact that blockades are illegal, I supported the protesters’ right to protest regardless. But my good will has run out. Their demands aren’t reasonable and their methods are not proportional to their grievance. Nobody wants to be wearing masks, and at this point I’m pretty much over them, but if Health Canada thinks it’ll help keep cases low enough to keep hospitals from overflowing then we can keep them for a couple more weeks. Whether or not this is the case is not for me to make a determination about. It’s been clear for about a month now that mask mandates would be lifted soon anyway.
> If being disruptive isn't the point of a protest, what is?
The protestors target for two weeks were random residents of downtown Ottawa. If you’re going to disrupt something, make sure you’ve got the right target. Otherwise you’re just an asshole with a horn.
>
> The act also allows for the military to be used as police, but several sources said that is not under active consideration.
Not a good look for Trudeau. This definitely looks like an authoritarian response to a loss of mandate. The protestors will dig in more, the response will become harsher, and the government will be in deeper trouble.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/new-york-mask...
Lets look at San Francisco. I'm going to get my stats right from the San Francisco Police Department.
Homocide - Down 20%
Rape - Down 23.8%
Robbery - Down 20.7%
Assault - Down 8.8%
Human Trafficking - Down 83.3%
Burglary - Down 45.4%
Motor Vehicle Theft - Down 6%
Arson - Down 7.9%
Larceny Theft - Up 12.8%
Year over year the only type of crime that is up is Larceny Theft, and most of that is shoplifting. Everything else is down, and some of it by significant margins. There is no real basis for this "crime wave" people keep talking about. That pressure is really just right wing propaganda.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Quick Edit: When I published this the stats were only current to February 6th, but they were updated after I posted with data up to the 13th. So my numbers above are going to be slightly off, but you can confirm them by changing the timeframe to end on the 6th.
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.
According to the SFPD link above, homicides in SF rose from 48 to 56 over the entire year 2021 vs 2020.
So given how flawed that premise was to begin with, I don't think an explanation is needed for why your overall point is disingenuous at best.
People trying to hype up the crime thing deliberately ignore these sources because, as you can see, it allows them to make up as much crime as they can imagine and base their argument on that.
Some "right wing propaganda" from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homi...
And WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/21/homicide-ra...
And The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/28/san-francisc...
Later edit: This chart [1] taken from said article maybe will clarify some of the ongoing discussions.
[1] https://archive.fo/78rGz/270f56724e7a40242b6639537e4183aea3b...
Infact from my own experience in Seattle area and the auto enthusiast groups I'm in, we've definitely seen an uptick in car prowling, smashed windows, cat thefts and outright vehicle/trailer thefts.
Motor Vehicle Theft is now up by 0.3%.
The idea that larceny (petty) theft doesn't matter is also a big reason why you think there's no crime wave. Petty theft is the crime most often encountered by everyday citizens. People don't like having their property stolen. I don't know why you refuse to acknowledge that.
Underreporting has always been an issue with crime data [1], but the change in the Larceny rate doesn't seem like it's caused by an increase in underreporting. The change in reported Larceny from 2020 seems fairly correlated with COVID restrictions.
Here is the monthly Y/Y change in Larceny Theft Reported incidents for SF, for each month in 2020 vs. 2019:
Jan: +15.7% Feb: +5.4% March: -28.7% (SF Shelter In Place) April: -47.1% May: -45.6% June: -48.9% July: -51.8% August: -50.1% September: -54.5% October: -54.9% November: -39.2% December: -46.7%
Larceny did go up in 2021, especially at the end of the year when COVID restrictions started to lift, but is still down ~20% relative to 2019. Other crimes went up in 2020, but then decreased or flattened in 2021.
I think you may have a point about Larceny being encountered more, especially with foot traffic + tourism way down in many SF neighborhoods. I'm not sure how exactly to use Open Table reservations as a proxy for that, so it's hard to say whether it's relatively up or relatively down.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
There definitely has been a surge of crime after the pandemic.
I see clips of train robberies in LA like this https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/01/14/train-the...
And then I have to ask myself how is that possible in modern society? Train robberies seem shocking enough that they HAVE to be indicative of a broader crime wave. Is there something about the US context that I am missing?
>According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
It's possible because Union Pacific thinks they can get taxpayers to pay for their security, and they can funnel more profits to their shareholders.
You think most Canadians support the illegal blockade? Really? Evidence please.
If Trudeau opened debate weeks ago I wonder where we would be today.
There was nothing to debate - the convoy does not have a cohesive message. Some of them are sovereign citizens. Some of them want the government to be dissolved. Some of them want some weird QAnon stuff. The only thing that unites them is shitting in the streets and driving around waving flags and honking.
Trudeau just looks weak at this point, and for a prime minister that got in because of his good looks and his dad's popularity it's not a good omen.
Heavy equipment tow operators have recieved threats of violence, which is why at least some of them have not helped.
The ones protesting are either uber-libertarians (and possibly also "sovereign citizens"), dis-educated, or have some sort of mental/emotional shortcoming where they will resist any sort of directive given to them even if it goes in their in their interest.
Sometimes people will lash out anyone who gives a helpful order because they feel like they're losing control.
This isn't "truckers" protesting, this is the radical fringe.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/28/canada-truck...
It is perfectly possible to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, because the case for mandates makes no scientific sense. Forcing the vaccines on people will create more anti-vaxxers, not fewer! The whole thing is completely counterproductive.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
I don't have this data for Canada, but here's the current ICU utilization in the US: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!
With the current dynamics of the disease though, authoritarian medical requirements are making much less sense over time. Vaccination doesn't really help curb transmission much and omicron is considerably less dangerous than previous variants. SARS2 was originally pretty near the threshold where government might not need to do anything forced and the new variant and ineffectiveness of the vaccine against is is pushing it further lower.
Do you think this protest is a more valid representation of Canadian democratic opinion than a federal election?
I think protesting is not only valid, but necessary to keep centralized powers from growing too complacent. The growth of freedom globally and the birth of democracy was not on the back of elections or playing by the rules defined by the class of people in centralized power.
and obviously Canada's democracy has begun to erode if their leader is calling for a state of emergency completely bypassing the democratic process using old laws meant only to be enacted in extreme circumstances...certainly not to punish protests that have at worst blocked major roads for days - all the critical roads of which have already been cleared.
That said, there is definitely something going wrong with a portion of Canadian society because they trust Rebel News and Infowars more than any legitimate media organisation. Getting to the root of it will be crucial in figuring out what went wrong.
Plus a future variant is likely to be even less affected by vaccination status.
Do you know of any evidence that would support this hypothesis? Especially when talking about evolution over short periods of time (years, not centuries or millennia)?
An article in the Guardian published several months ago argued the opposite[0]; and while the Guardian is certainly no authority on scientific matters, and could well have its own narratives to push, their article suggests that this is not a well-known behaviour of pathogens.
Obviously it is no longer still this deadly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm
With all the covid talk, it is hard to quickly find a good source for the theory and verification of the evolutionary dynamics of diseases I mentioned, but as can be seen with variants (and how Omicron clearly wiped out Delta by overcompeting it) evolution of viruses absolutely does not need thousands or millions of years.
Yes. I included thousands of years to accommodate the co-evolution of both the pathogen and the host, which, obviously, evolves at a much slower rate.
And since you mention how omicron wiped out delta, hadn't delta in its turn wiped out alpha, while being (I don't remember, was there a consensus on this?) a more dangerous variant?
SARS-COV-2 and its descendants seem to me somewhat uniquely qualified to pull this off as they're one of the few viruses that are asymptomatically spread, meaning you can be infected, pass the virus on, then die for all it cares.
The above however, is not reason for us as a species to endlessly pursue locking down and pushing for restrictive measures when we see the situation clearing up and the above not being the case. When the time comes restrictions will be removed (this was already being discussed in a bunch of places) and hopefully we can just get back to the normal worries of the day such as impending climate disaster and war.
> That, given that provinces are lifting COVID-19 restrictions and that Dr. Theresa Tam has said that all existing public health measures need to be "re-evaluated" so that we can "get back to some normalcy", the House call on the government to table a plan for the lifting of all federal mandates and restrictions, and to table that plan by February 28, 2022.
Just because you support the end of restrictions doesn't mean you should support people getting what they want through illegal methods. This is supposed to be a democracy.
Canada just had an election, and the people pro-vaccine and pro-mandates were elected.
Yes, durect democracy and being allowed to all vote on all issues is a nice dream, but for now the system is a representative democracy. And it's not okay to force things through keeping people hostage.
Would you be similarly supportive if 5000 people blocked essential infrastructure with big trucks everytime they want something?
In my opinion, if we were to see a really large gathering, of the kind that BLM saw, then if say, ok, it does seem there's a lot of people who really care about this so maybe have a direct referendum, but this one hasn't met the threshold in my opinion.
Direct democracy is 100% mob rule but no one really cares to read the Federalist Papers or the mountain of thought that was put into this at the start of the US.
Wtf, you want them to vote, and if trudeau wins the vote, you want him to resign? Really a heads i win tails you lose sort of plan.
Besides,its a minority government, trudeau doesn't have to put it up for a vote, if he was going to lose, the opposition would put it to a vote.
And that's ignoring that 95% of what they are protesting isn't even federal juridsiction and has nothing to do with trudeau. He wouldn't be able to interfere if he wanted to.
I suspect that if Trudeau enforces Ottawa laws (which the police haven't), then stands down, this won't hurt public perception.
The posters here decrying this as authoritarian don't understand anything about Canadian law, experience, or mindset and are going by what they're fed by their individual media source of choice. The War Measures Act invocation by Pierre Trudeau was one of the most singularly divisive moments (some would argue it was necessary, some would argue the opposite) in Canadian history, and made parliament realize they needed to rein in the Prime Minister's powers.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/02/12/two-thirds-of-canadia...
The current approach seems to be a lot more mild than what the public would accept.
The boat ended up being named 'boaty mcboatface'
I don't know how much I take stock in online polls especially made by partisan sources.
Huffington post did an online poll about who would win the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton received around 99% of the votes.
“ The poll was conducted Feb. 9 and 10, 2022 among a random selection of 1,506 Canadian adults who are Maru Voice Canada panelists and is accurate within +/- 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.”
It’s right there in the linked article.
The pro-liberty move is to get rid of the occupiers.
On the scope of major protests in the last several decades in western democracies, this one definitely is about as close to the “peaceful” extreme as any have been.
As a society, we should also strive for fairness in our rhetoric. It betrays our credibility to describe a riot which leaves a city in ashes as “mostly peaceful protest” simply because we agree with the cause and then to characterize these protests as “violent” because we don’t agree with them.
> Two-thirds of Canadians support military force to end Ottawa protests
This is the last real protest in Canada. Next time, these "emergency" powers will either be immediate or these new powers are just new permanent government powers.
2/3rds the citizens will practically be demanding that this never happens again.
A lesson in why Ben Franklin said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
What about X or Y is not a valid response to this argument. You can have no public opinion on antifa or BLM in another country to have the opinion that activity in your own community is not okay. We can compare this to BLM or antifa, but we can also compare BLM or antifa to the Arab spring or French revolution to say that they’re relatively peaceful too.
The fact is this entire thing has been horribly covered by the media.
There are a lot of groups and factions involved in the protest. The main leadership group is organized (and fundraised) by Canada Unity, and their original demands were to overthrow the democratically elected government to install themselves as government and rule through the senate and governer general. You can look that up in their original MOU on the way back machine.
The means of the protest was to park heavy equipment and harass the citizens of downtown Ottawa (via keeping them awake 24/7 with train horns, arguably a form of warfare) until the federal government capitulated to demands. This is essentially the “I’m not touching you, but my hand is directly in front of your face” form of harassment. Later that evolved into blocking border crossings, which is explicitly illegal and explicitly under the criminal code listed as not an acceptable form of protest.
The complications of this issue are confounded by the fact that more than half the donated funds are foreign funds to a protest that was deemed an illegal action.
I personally support the spirit of the protest (i.e. the vaccines should be optional for most jobs and the vaccine mandate should be relaxed) but not the tools they are using, in particular blocking a vital bridge and the honking shenanigans.
I personally have no problem in expressing a nuanced point of view or accepting that I got something wrong. Truth is a very elusive concept. And I rather learn than argue.
The person I was replying to however is aggressively partisan in his opinions. And while it's true that my comment wasn't a proper rebuttal, it does address his lack of credibility for arguing a one sided view of the world.
Sauce?
Here's one about "unruly protesters" (quote from the article) shutting down two grocery stores: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/unruly-protesters-prompt-earl...
Here's one about a restaurant deciding to close, and stay closed, due to an assault of and racial epithets directed at employees: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/moo-shu-ice-cream-empl...
https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-pro...
Convoy protesters break through Surrey RCMP barricade with military-style vehicle
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/convoy-protesters-break-through-surrey...
There's also another supposed hate hoax: https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1490439304224686082
The fact that such a "violent" protest requires so many hoaxes to justify the characterization should help you triangulate the truth.
The only reason for the act is because of the illegal blockades which is affecting essential services, goods and livelihood of local business and citizens.
A peaceful protest cannot hold people hostage by blocking their access to essential services and goods, and trapping them in.
If the protest stopped doing that, then it's fine to continue as long as it wants.
You can't have a very small minority get its way by simply holding others hostage to their services and goods. The point of a protest is to be heard and get people to consider your cause, not to consider your demands through extraction.
https://www.go2hr.ca/legal/strikes-lockouts-picketing-and-re...
You're only including direct physical violence as part of your "not peaceful" definition. But blocking major road arteries and bridges that are essential to the economy and to bringing in/out services and goods to the people of Ontario is also an act that a peaceful protest wouldn't do.
I'm very pro-protest by the way. Including for people I disagree with. A few broken windows, some small contained fires in trash cans, and just the general side effects of having a thousand+ people in a small city space all protesting I'm absolutely okay with, even a few little breakout fights, I still would consider that a peaceful protest.
Blocking major roads using heavy machinery with no alternate route that can meet the needs of the local population, that goes beyond peaceful in my opinion.
P.S.: I've also watched live streams, I always do, I've seen BLM protests first hand for example, and all media always exaggerate a protest, so I'm the last person who'd believe the headlines at first. In this case though, I know even the truckers probably don't think it's that big a deal that they have their trucks blocking roads, but given the already stretched crisis of the Pandemic, the second order effects on supply is a big deal. Please keep protesting, but don't block those major roads. Move to smaller roads even if you want.
They know what's coming, when they decided to block those roads, they knew they didn't leave people a choice, they are cutting off a supply line, this is beyond protest, it's an attempt to say, if you want your supply back, do what we want. I'm sorry, that's beyond: We won't stop voicing our concerns and expressing our rights to protest.
Using government power intended for things like war to suppress a protest is ridiculous, if this is what being "liberal" is about, I'm out.
I hope the response is a protest escalation. Not my country, not my protest, but I know who I'm rooting for.
Contrast this to what was happening in Minneapolis a couple of summers ago... people burning down buildings, shops, and police stations and the fire and police literally afraid to go places in the city until we had armed forces marching through the streets. Those are the kind of popular uprisings that need to be dealt with, not streets being blocked by unhappy people.
Singular.
At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either, though I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
They completely abandoned a police precinct which was promptly burned down [0]. Pretty safe to say they were afraid to stay at their own building!
0: https://www.twincities.com/2020/05/28/minneapolis-police-aba...
>At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either
The police abandoned the 3rd precinct station which was burned down later that night. How's that for being afraid to be in a place?
There were plenty of stories of fire trucks not going places for security reasons, and eventually firemen had national guard escorts. I don't know what that is besides "being afraid" to go places in the city.
>>“We were faced with these fail fail fail options,” Mr. Frey (Minneapolis mayor) said. “We were literally having to choose between preventing additional looting, protecting a precinct and providing escorts to firefighters to put out fires. There was no way we could do all three.”
>Damage in Minneapolis was mostly confined to a singular street.
A main street which crossed the cities, miles long. And damage wasn't at all confined there. There were several hot spots around the cities.
>I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
Well, here's the New York Times backing up my claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/minneapolis-government...
Comparing privileged truckers to Canadian indigenous people is chalk and cheese.
As for pay, I’m seeing wages of $85K + bennies advertised around here. That’s not a bad wage.
Very privileged.
Regardless, I agree that the emergencies act is overkill. I think the Canadian government should sit down with the protestors and come up with a plan that alleviates the situation. I don't think a police vs protestor clash in the streets is going to end well for anyone.
“You need to get vaccinated, or you can’t work in cross border trucking or go to restaurants for a year or two” is an infinitely smaller ask than “give up control of your land to us, also your drinking water is poison”
What is the correct amount of economic harm in your view? What are the terms under which a protest should be allowed by a government?
"Public safety" is a good one, you're free to protest but there has to be adequate access for emergency services to get to people in need.
"No significant destruction" is a good one, not just making a mess in the streets but when your movement starts actively destroying property, looting, etc.
If you keep doing economic harm, your movement will tend to get pretty unpopular pretty quickly and the social pressure instead of government force will likely get to you in the end.
Lots of people walking of the job will do significant amounts of economic harm, I don't want people in certain jobs to become effective slaves because their job is important to the economy. And also a general strike is a very powerful action which should be done from time to time, explicitly very economically powerful and definitely should be protected.
This one is also ripe for abuse - outside forces have been using agents provocateurs for centuries, often undercover cops.
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 5.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 11.4 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 10, 2022 to January 16, 2022, unvaccinated people were 21.8 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
For the first point, I have some doubt as many covid infections go entirely undetected. If you don't have symptoms you don't get tested and don't end up a statistic. Even the CDC says it expects there have been 4x as many infections as reported.
For the next two, those aren't things which need government compelled vaccinations. You're taking a risk with your own health, I don't care if you take a risk and it kills you.
If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
The only metric that should require vaccination should be to prevent public spread, and then only if the risk to other people is beyond a threshold. It is pretty clear that omicron burned through populations regardless of vaccination status or previous infection. Forcing vaccinations could have lowered this rate a bit, but doubtfully enough to prevent everyone who was going to be exposed from being exposed anyway at a slightly later date.
If you're forcing vaccinations so somebody is more likely to get infected in March rather than January, it is not worth it or a justifiable action. That seems to be the situation with the current vaccine and current dominant variant. Infection is inevitable, short term delay is the only achievable goal, therefore mandates are no longer an acceptable use of government power. Omicron isn't in decline because people were smart or safe or did what they were told, it declined because it ran out of people to infect, vaccination rate didn't seem to significantly alter this pattern around the world except for when the peak happened and perhaps how wide and tall it was.
> If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
You just immediately contradicted yourself. "It's only a risk to you", but also the government needs to find more hospital staff to take care of you. The fact is, nurses and doctors are burnt out and they're leaving the field because of this bullshit. They don't have enough people to train new health care workers, and even if they did it takes years before they're qualified. You can't just throw money at a staffing issue like this.
Forcing someone to inject something into their body against their will in order to save you a few tax dollars is simply disgusting.
Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10...but I do well, I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes. But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that. Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social. Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
Twice right? And then a saline booster every 6 months too right?
> I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes.
Your lead argument for mandating vaccination was the potential cost of care.
> But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that.
I have no clue what you’re talking about here.
> Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social.
I said no such thing.
There’s a world of difference between opposing a mandate that everybody take a vaccine and opposing vaccines.
Everybody who wants one should get one. They’re free, available on just about every corner, and I’m not aware of anyone right now who wants one who can’t get one.
I’m also not aware of anyone except the most paranoid triple vaxed that still wear a mask outdoors. Now thats anti-social. Not “following the science” either.
> Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
For posterity, for the third time: obesity is not comparable to COVID, because obesity is not a problem which is instantly resolvable for almost no cost and no effort.
Smoking is also not comparable to COVID, because nicotine addiction is also not a problem that is instantly resolvable, for almost no cost. We also tax the hell out of nicotine, which helps offset the burden smokers place on society. If you're content with how we treat smokers, is there some way we could analogously tax the voluntarily unvaccinated to help offset the burden they're placing on the rest of us that you'd be happy with?
Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way. There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation. You can argue from that, if you want; but if you're going to try arguing from specifics, by analogy to specific things, you need to actually think those specifics out.
For posterity, I'll also try to clarify what I meant about taxes, and why what you're advocating for precisely leads to the consequences you claim not to support:
A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations. There's no real economic benefit to spending that extra money, and that money needs to come from somewhere. It could come from debt or printing money, but that leads to inflation. Inflation makes everyone poorer; it makes it harder to afford basic necessities like housing and food, almost inevitably leading to some degree of starvation and homelessness. It could come from reallocating money that the government spends on programs elsewhere - but those programs generally exist for a reason, usually to help the people in the most dire of straits, and cutting funding to those programs is going to hurt those people - often leading to, you guessed it, consequences like starvation and homelessness. Or it could come from raising taxes - on the poor and middle class, which is awful, because generally speaking those people need that money (and guess what happens when people don't have money they need); or on the rich, which is probably the least awful option, Laffer curve be damned, but is also the least likely to happen, and is still wholly unnecessary. And of course: this ignores what was mentioned above, which is that there's no amount of money the government could throw at hospitals to let them instantaneously increase their capacity 50x over, because the staff literally doesn't exist. So it's an inevitability that the unvaccinated are clogging our hospitals, leading people to die due to treatable conditions.
That you consider giving up body autonomy "almost no cost" is what's simply insane.
It's not a sliding scale where $X of savings for Y% of personal choice. It's a black and white line that involves someone else, whether elected or appointed, deciding that you must inject this into your body for the good of society.
> I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way.
Damn right.
> There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation.
The only people that think the world is going to end if Trucker Joe does not get vaccinated are the same triple vaxed ones that are still wearing masks outdoors.
> A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations...
That doesn't matter and claiming that you could use the same money for $PULL_HEARTSTRINGS does not make the argument any more valid.
People who give up individual freedoms to save a buck will end both enslaved and penniless.
None whatsoever.
I’m ok with hospitals having to do work, if they’re overwhelmed I’m ok with the government having to support them in various ways.
Almost unexceptionally yes?
Arab Spring in Egypt, civil rights lunch counter sit-ins, the protests in East Germany in 89...
I'm actually having a hard time thinking of historic protests which didn't inflict economic harm.
Hyperbolic example: If there was a 0.01% minority in your country/region which was violently opposed to some existing minor local law or regulation, would it be ok for them to shut down half the economy over it? Think of all the secondary damage that's doing every time someone gets upset over something relatively-small in the big picture. I think most would think that's unreasonable. It's this question that gets at the heart of when and/or if it's ok for a heavy-handed government to come in and put a stop to things. When is it reasonable for the powers that be to intervene and "stop a protest" because the toll is too high for the weight and/or popularity of the matter at hand?
Now with these protests, causing even more incredibly severe economic harms they've demurred from criticizing the protestors.
This isn't the war measures act. It is a response specifically targeted to situations like this.
"I hope the response is a protest escalation"
That's neat. I hope that every protester that misused a privilege of their CDL lose their truck license, lose insurance, have their bank accounts locked, and face enormous fines. I guess we have differing hopes.
Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
"Not my country"
Oh gosh, what a surprise...
And then, of course, a comparison with completely irrelevant other events that most of us also found reprehensible.
I hate when the protests appear on HN because it makes me realize how terrible "right wing" so many on here are (not conservative -- I'm conservative -- but rather a particularly...stupid and angry version that now parades as right wing in the US), and how absolutely reprehensible opinions are. A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
Like forcing people out of their job for refusing a vaccine?
Disclaimer: I'm vaccinated and I encourage everyone to do it. But no one should have to under threat to their livelihood, especially given the absurd logical inconsistencies of the mandate rules.
Before vaccination was politicized in the US (bizarrely, I must say, through mechanisms that I find absolutely baffling), many jobs had mandatory vaccinations. Most healthcare setting have mandatory yearly flu vaccinations, for instance. The military has a whole plethora of mandatory vaccinations, including some pretty crazy ones. And of course schools, daycare, etc have forced vaccinations.
Suddenly it's a big issue. Ask yourself why.
And for what it's worth, I've been against mandates since omicron made it evident that they were no longer useful. I have zero tolerance for these protests, though, and would like to see them absolutely stomped.
I remember seeing the roots of this in the early 2000s after the discredited Wakefield study. It was so bizarre.
5x more likely to die while unvaccinated than vaccinated.
Side effects of getting covid are significantly worse than any real reported side effects as well. Which at this point you will get covid if you haven't had it already.
All the sick people piling up in the hospital ruins care for others who are in ER for other reasons, this isn't about control, it's about doing whats best for everyone.
We've had vaccine mandates for decades at this point, if it wasn't for the Fox News & the Murdoch Cinematic Universe this would really be a non-issue.
I'm curious what your answer is. To me its obvious: people don't trust these vaccines (or these authorities) the way that they have trusted other vaccines with much longer histories of use.
The next why is a hairier question that a lot of people will have different answers for, but it all stems from that lack of trust.
Politicization and tribalism, obviously.
> people don't trust these vaccines
There are traditional anti-vaxxers of the "my body is my temple" ilk: Organic food, often vegan or vegetarian, against all vaccines and with an often bizarre notion of what is a "chemical" or not. Usually super fit. No one is surprised when these people are against COVID vaccines as it's consistent with everything else they stand for.
But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7. Often very unhealthy. They've never had the slightest concern or attention for any vaccine or medication, including novel, experimental medications (including those which they'll eagerly accept when they get COVID). New vaccines like the HPV vaccine, or yearly flu vaccine changes that have whatever random assortment of other ingredients, have never been of any concern or earned even a moment of their concern.
But suddenly they have very specific thoughts about this vaccine? Come on. And if it's the scary "changes your DNA" (but actually doesn't) bit, there are alternative, less effective more traditional vaccines which they also refuse.
It's tribalism. Early on their group ("conservatives") took some positions about responding to COVID -- anti-masking, anti-lockdowns, etc -- and that cemented into positions that somehow morphed into being anti-vaccine (basically anti anything seen as controlling or responding to COVID), despite there being literally nothing from a values or political perspective that would explain it (indeed, there are loads of classic conservative tenets that would directly oppose this anti-vax position). Then loads of people realized they could grift off of exploiting this divide, politicians -- most of whom are vaccinated -- saw an opening to pander, etc.
It is baffling and needs to be studied in depth. Tens to hundreds of millions of people could self-destructively be turned against something simply because they saw it as outside their tribe and messaging.
You're making some pretty specific assertions here that your whole rant seems to hinge on. Source?
As to your demand for a "source" -- as if there's a scientific paper I can cite -- there are zero rational people who can read what I wrote and seriously question it, beyond weak HN trolls who have nothing.
It's uncomfortable for sure, though: Knowing that one's entire position about complex topics (vaccines, AGW, etc) is dictated by tribalism is pretty embarrassing when one really thinks about it. Particularly if one has blanketed it in lots of ridiculous rationalizations and explanations -- a legacy of nonsense -- carefully curating their YouTube channels of disinformation.
[Gestures broadly at everything]
> You wrote a lot of text attacking a certain type of person
I "attacked" no one. If you feel an attack in it, you really need to reflect on why that makes you feel persecuted. Why a political demographic with zero historic interest in vaccines suddenly feels very opinionated about it is fascinating and disturbing.
I made a broad societal observation -- a plainly evident observation -- about tribalism overriding rational thought. And it's important to note that tribalism cuts all ways, and there are many cases of the "left" polarizing around something that is in no way a liberal or leftist value specifically because it's the tribal position.
> But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7.
So not to speak for the other poster, but I think another way to phrase their comment would be: what makes you believe this army exists? How many of them have you personally interacted with vs saw in some form of infotainment?
I ask because your description sounds like the kind of political cartoon you'd see in a news rag, and might be bolstered by that guy you remember from highschool or that crazy uncle that you can't stand. But I don't think its plainly evident that these people actually exist in great numbers.
I strongly believe what you're saying about tribalism. I just think your comment is another example of it.
Yeah. Ruining people's lives is a weird desire that somehow became very popular in recent years among the same people who usually criticized punitive justice.
> Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
Signing petitions and lobbying is a privilege of people with power. Neither the US nor France became a republic by signing petitions. Those are, of course, extremes, but those events are the basis of the liberal democracy, so it is quite ridiculous to dismiss everything beyond petitions and parties as crossing a line. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't enacted because someone signed a petition either. In fact, the protests were widely unpopular among people (https://imgur.com/4GYbaDt). Gene Sharp, a political scientists that studied nonviolent struggle, described in his book (http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TARA.pdf ) 198 methods of nonviolent actions, and they include far more possibilities than meek petitions.
>A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
And there is a vicious cycle where people are trying to one-up garbage takes by coming up with more and more ridiculous responses to each other.
Whether the response is authoritarian depends on how it is enforced. The police have basically failed to enforce any law on the occupiers on parliament hill (I live here). If the local enforcement had happened preemptively and as per the law, the situation wouldn't have escalated as far as it has done.
Governments chosen by a first-past-the-post system can barely be considered democratically legitimate, if at all.
> I don’t like governments elected on Tuesday. I’d prefer Wednesday.
FPTP vs. good election systems is not a trivial distinction like this, so your analogy is invalid.
If people could vote as they truly wanted without fear of throwing away their votes, the center would almost certainly move.
As to the back and forth between two major parties, that's hardly surprising. I'm not sure that indicates much in terms of what people actually want.
Systems with ranked choice or similar measures to encourage smaller parties end up with a similar situation, but with less stability. Since those parties appeal to narrower bands of society, they are unable to form a government. Eventually they are forced into coalition, which brings them to the same place as the major parties in FPTP: compromise. Yet, since coalitions are inherently more fragile than parties, you get less stability, and less institutional pressure on individuals in government and cabinet to represent wider interests.
Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
I don’t think this is true outside the English-speaking countries. Most “Western” countries are in Europe and have systems with some degree of proportionality where coalition governments are the norm.
> Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
It was an intentionally extreme comparison to show that “operates according to the rules” is not sufficient for a system to count as democratic. Of course Canada is much closer to counting as a liberal democracy than North Korea is, but for reasons other than “it operates according to its own internal rules”.
Perhaps a better analogy would have been Hong Kong a few years ago (before the situation there became worse and things became more directly controlled by the central Chinese state). Hong Kong has never been a democracy by any reasonable definition, but did have robust rule of law and liberal rights, despite elections being basically rigged due to the functional constituencies system.
That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties. Maybe you would indeed have a supermajority of left-of-center parties but you can't conclude that they'd all have the same Covid restriction policies as the current ones.
Ranked choice (any form, not just IRV) voting systems without proportional allocation (whether multimember districts with STV, mixed member proportional, or party-list proportional, or something else) do not significantly increase the number of viable parties.
On the other hand, I'm amazed that 5% of the population voted for the People's Party of Canada -- a party which had no hope of winning. This absolutely split the vote on the right enough to make the CPC lose seats.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8212872/canada-election-conservat...
The the proposal of the convoy occupiers is that their organization picks a committee to run the country. That's a significantly less legitimate government with absolutely no claim at a mandate.
The best we can do is look at opinion polls, which suggest that most people want to get rid of most Covid restrictions, but also don’t support the trucker protest.
However, there was still an election.
Canada got vaccine way after the US because they simply wouldn’t help companies pay for R&D and secure orders earlier, like the US did. So while you could get a walk-in vaccine at Wallmart here in America people were waiting in line for weeks for a chance at an appointment in Canada.
Imagine how many lives it could have saved instead had they just put that money toward getting vaccines earlier.
> At the federal level, a vote of no confidence is a motion presented by a member of the House of Commons that explicitly states the House has no confidence in the incumbent government.[3] The government may also declare any bill or motion to be a question of confidence.
Major bills like budgets are automatically confidence votes as well. I think you need to get into the parliamentary minutiae to understand when other votes could cause an election.
OTOH in a Presidential system you get no such opportunity to get the public’s opinion. You have to wait until the end of terms (congressional or presidential or both).
If a majority of Members of Parliament vote yes on a no-confidence vote, that will trigger an election. Otherwise the prime minister chooses when an election will happen, within 5 years. If the government is a minority, it is likely it will call an election within a year or two if they're confident they could get a majority (this happened last year). Otherwise, with a majority government, they tend to wait longer before calling an election.
For what it's worth: no he didn't, he got 50.3% of the vote[1]. We don't directly elect prime ministers in Canada.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papineau_(electoral_district)#...
The issue is that Ottawa Police were afraid of media backlash if they did any crowd control for the initial "protest" weekend. This allowed the occupiers to move in heavy machinery as barricades. When the weekend ended and the trucks didn't move, they realized they were dealing with something closer to an insurrection than a protest, and they've been impotent to stop it since.
THe people of Ottawa overwhelmingly support ending the occupation. It has terrorized women, queer people and people of color on the streets. They've been violent and confrontational with front-line workers, which forced two grocery stores to close their doors, plus a large mall. There have been two documented attempts to burn down residential apartment buildings and trap the occupants inside.
This weekend hundreds of Ottawa residents marched in a counter-protest, and also blocked the road and held up a convoy of trucks for more than 8 hours. The occupiers are a small group of people who are acting badly - shitting in the streets, getting drunk, blaring their horns, and using their children as human shields. Everyone will celebrate when they're gone for good.
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-tracker/
"A new Angus Reid poll showed that 54% of Canadians support an immediate halt to all pandemic restrictions, a stark contrast to the 56% who said as recently as in December they would have supported another round of lockdowns over Omicron."
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2022/02/13/2662060/half-o...
> As the country rolls into another week of uncertainty, nearly three-quarters of Canadians (72%) say the time has come for protesters to “go home, they have made their point.”
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine...
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/cur...
The specific question was "It’s time to end restrictions and let people self isolate if they’re at risk.", which describes basically the process that basically all provinces were going through prior to the protests.
Then why require the mandate? I haven't seen any answer to that question besides the implied: "because we demand full compliance."
This allows the federal government to send the army if necessary (although Trudeau said they wouldn't), allows the police to fine and detain protestor that do not want to leave the blockade. And allows the federal government to require private companies to provide services, in this case towing companies to tow the rigs.
It also allows for freezing bank accounts of e.g. companies that have trucks participating in the blockade without a court mandate.
I think, but I am not sure, that this only applies to "strategic sites", in this case the border and maybe highways. Protester blocking a random street in Ottawa may not be concerned.
So, why require the mandate: To prevent the slim minority of truckers participating in the blockade from impacting everyone else for months.
But sure, it's all because of Trudeau's ego.
"beginning in early January 2022, DHS will require that all inbound foreign national travelers crossing U.S. land or ferry POEs – whether for essential or non-essential reasons – be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and provide related proof of vaccination. This approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers, students, and healthcare workers to get vaccinated."
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2021/10/12/secretary-mayorkas-allow...
So it causes no harmful change for Canadians in general, for as you say, nothing changes.
So... why not give in to this demand then?
As an aside, forcing truckers to get vaccinated makes no sense. They mostly work in isolation, and it isn't like blocking the virus at borders really helps these days.
I support forced vaccination for front line health care workers, those caring for the elderly, where it matters.
Giving in would set a terrible precedent and would undermine Canada's continued existence as a free society.
(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)
It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.
Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?
So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.
In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.
So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.
NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.
Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]
It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ
Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.
Why do you believe this? Do you assume there is no benefit to doing so? Or do you assume that the harms outweigh the benefits?
You'd be wrong on both counts. [1]
The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.
That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.
Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?
Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.
"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."
You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?
$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?
Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system
As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.
While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.
There were no orders but recommendations only in regards to vaccines. I understand you realize the difference between the order and recommendation. Recommendation does not require compliance.
And the burden was caused by lockdowns and complete absence of vaccines in Canada for a big while
Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/03/28/anti-v...
It’s amazing that the definition of a word like vaccine could change suddenly, because it is was incompatible to one virus — a mysterious super virus whose origin is still unknown, according to the WHO.
Is the science settled on whether 90% vs 100% has an impact on the health of society given omicron?
> Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated
Conflating traditional anti vaxers with the new COVID anti vaxers is dishonest, they actually usually come from different parts of the political spectrum.
It is militancy like yours that is elevating opposition.
I am vaccinated but support anyone that stands up to a mandate, vaccination passes or emergency powers. I don't really have to justify that any further.
Accordingly places where transmission is likely (eg. a small intimate restaurant) are serious and potentially deadly health risks to the elderly, unvaccinated part of the population.
So long as our hospitals are overwhelmed (as they currently are) it's a very bad idea to open up these high transmission areas to unvaccinated people, as they'll inevitably catch the disease and are so much more likely to end up in the hospital in ICU.
This is why restaurants/bars/etc should continue to have vaccine mandates even though so many people are vaccinated.
The point isn't to coerce the last 10% into getting vaccinated. It's to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed by new cases from the unvaccinated.
In all provinces, the elderly were the very first to get vaccinated. First. First to get second vaccinations, and for a long time, the only group allowed to even get a third shot.
There are no unvaccinated elderly people running around, unless they insist on not being vaccinated. In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
Your last paragraph makes sense, but the rest?!
> In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
Yeah it's getting to the point where if stubborn old people want to meet their maker sooner than later, well sure that's their choice and we should let them, but at the moment the hospitals are overwhelmed and this has negative impacts on everyone, as it delays all the other surgeries and other work that the hospital needs to do.
I'm fine with lifting vaccine mandates once hospitals are unlikely to get overwhelmed, but it's not at all clear we're at this point yet.
Going to be very interesting to see what happens in Alberta and Sask over the next little while as they're lifting the vaccine passports.
notice the probable or confirmed case and know that hospitals (US) are eligible for additional reimbursement with covid “case” patient from a $100 Billion CARES act fund (at minimum)
>Individuals who received at least one dose was calculated as (# of individuals who received at least one dose) / (population estimate).
Deaths are also only attributed to Vaccinated category after 14 days from the second dose, else it’s a “unvaccinated” death.
This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated. It’s just magical how “science” to advance “public health” works.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm... — the source data for the site in the parent post
Sounds like a nonsense insane tin foil hat theory to me.
Now with Omicron (for the last few weeks at least) it's clearly not needed any more, but governments move slowly, so it'd take a few more weeks. There's other restrictions that were put in around that timeframe that no longer make sense, like requiring PCR tests, and all those are on their way out.
This protest makes no sense except as a way of sowing chaos and seeking to destabilize the country.
Seriously? This smells like an attempt to paint the truckers as extreme right. Any quality sources for that claim?
> PAT KING: Pat King is a far-right protester who has said in videos posted to social media that there may be future plans to target politicians' homes and that "the only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets." He has called for the arrest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly.
> King has gained attention online for a video posted to Twitter in which he decries the "depopulation" of white people, as well as another video posted in 2019 in which he makes racist remarks about Jewish, Muslim, and Chinese people.
"Health care workers in Ottawa are being harassed protesters against COVID-19 mandates" - https://www.npr.org/2022/02/12/1080354245/health-care-worker...
"Unruly protesters prompt early closure of two downtown grocery stores" - https://ottawacitizen.com/news/unruly-protesters-prompt-earl...
"Ottawa police issue 825 more tickets, respond to reports of protesters ‘harassing children’" - https://ottawa.citynews.ca/police-beat/ottawa-police-issue-8...
> Police have said they are concerned about how the convoy has attracted far-right and extremist elements, and on Sunday confirmed they were dealing with more than 60 criminal investigations, with alleged offences including "mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage". - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60281088
"Canada: Ottawa protests full of 'hate propaganda'" - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/canada-ottawa-prot...
I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
From a distance it's very hard to judge what's true and what isn't. My level of trust in the media these days is extremely low so reading stories about Nazi Flags I'm thinking "click bait". Meanwhile forums like reddit - and slowly HN as well - are clearly filled with "paid shill" accounts. So what to trust?
> I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
I'm sorry to hear that. I did check your HN profile briefly and you "seem legit"
What did they do to terrorize those identities specifically and what did/do they benefit from it?
Pretty much every business in deep-liberal cities at this point simply ignores restrictions.
What mandate? Seems like there wasn’t one in the first place.
Over 1.6 million people tweeted about the Canadian trucker protests over the country’s vaccine mandates, reaching about 330 million users. Of the top 100 most retweeted tweets on the topic, 79% were in support of the protests.
https://twitter.com/NarrativesProj/status/149361219856801792...
He has a minority government. A weak one at that. If he really lost his mandate there would be a snap election already.
Say what now? Which part of the act allows that? I skimmed through it and didn't see anything relevant.
> Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he has invoked the Emergencies Act as a “last resort” to bolster the police response to convoy demonstrators and to “bring the situation fully under control.”
I really feel like there were a number of "resorts" that could've been taken before this "last" one.
Engaging in dialogue with the truckers and not inflaming the situation by calling the truckers names are at the top of my list.
Engaging in dialogue with Canadians would be next on my list.
Using the powers granted to Ontario in their state of emergency would be on my list well before declaring a nation-wide emergency.
What was the "first resort"? Trudeau isn't even willing to speak with the protesters.
>There is still no indication Trudeau is willing to sit down or speak to convoy participants. He said he doesn’t regret describing those taking part with “unacceptable views” as a “fringe” in Canada[0] [0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/pm-says-everything-on-the-ta...
The first resorts are the issue being dealt with by local police. The fact that local police couldn't resolve this, and neither could reinforcements from the Ontario Provincial Police is very troubling tbh. It really should never get to this point.
At the end of this there needs to be an inquiry as to why the police were unable to get a grip on the situation.
The province is governed by a right-winger who will not do anything to upset his base. They've been pointing fingers at the municipal police, and vice-versa, and refusing to act.
The truckers are a very small group with no cohesive messaging. It's a bunch of dudes having a party and yelling about how they want to overthrow the government and install JFK Jr or whatever. There is no dialogue that would de-escalate them, it would only legitimize them.
The people of Canada have overwhelmingly stated that they want the occupation to end. They're sick of seeing people desecrate monuments, steal from the homeless, harass vulnerable people, shit in the streets, and make noise 24/7. The truckers have started taking their flags down when they're driving in town because everyone hates them and they don't want to be seen outside the red zone.
I know he hasn't been especially effective during all of this but there's also not much he can do since mayors here are pretty much glorified councillors.
Pretending to express concern about charter rights with respect to towing some trucks away is quite the theatre.
Meanwhile, Canada spent the last two years stomping on charter rights: mobility (provincial borders closed, unjustified quarantine requirements even for vaccinated Canadians), free expression (court orders to silence anti-vaxxers), and free assembly (unvaccinated in Quebec are unable to attend weddings, funerals, religious services or pretty much anything with over 25 people) to name a few. Ironically, a lot of these are the things that actually caused the protests.
It’s been disappointing to see judges go along with it all (Canada has a big opt-out for charter rights, in that “reasonable limits” are allowed if they can be “demonstrably justified”), but quite ridiculous to see that statement in this context.
Indeed, and there is ample case law from the Supreme Court of Canada that provides guidance to judges as to how to apply that section of the Charter.
R v. Oakes was one of the seminal cases in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Oakes
I feel like in the US, states, the federal government and the judiciary tend to be more adversarial and this can be quite useful.
Apart from the quarantine requirements and possibly your point about free expression (though I'm not sure which incident that refers to and you provided no references), none of the rest of that list is under the purview of the federal government and is instead decided upon by the provinces.
In case you aren't familiar, Canadian provinces have near total control over most areas, with the federal government typically stepping in only in areas that were explicitly granted to it. The provinces, for instance, are responsible for all healthcare related decisions within their borders. The federal government licenses drugs and treatments as a centralized body for all provinces, though I believe here too the provinces can take some steps on their own. Provinces can equally ignore the charter rights of citizens for a set period of time by invoking a specific clause when passing legislation (it's been done several times recently). Provinces wholly own their mineral rights, including into the waters on their borders.
The point I am making with this explanation is that the issues the convoy began protesting (that truckers had to be vaccinated to cross the US/Canada border) made sense to protest federally. Once it was apparent the US had implemented the same rule (coming into effect before Canada, if I remember rightly), the protest became about other mandates. These other mandates are purely provincial jurisdiction and the federal government could only hope to convince the Premiers to do what they ask. The protest is misplaced in its entirety at this point, which is why there is no cohesive direction.
In terms of the targeting of the protests — I agree, it makes little sense. But it’s a bunch of angry, not-so-rational people. In any case, I suspect the federal government does have a lot of sway, and would still be able influence quite a lot. Trudeau has a pen and a phone, as Obama would say. I’m sure that the lifting of the border exemptions was not unilateral on either side, and there are symbolic things that federal government could do (such as setting an expiration vaccine requirements for domestic air travel).
In the end, I think Trudeau has backed himself into a corner. He probably could have preempted this by “listening to the science” and recommending a relaxation plan with a reasonable timeframe (even if it relied on provincial cooperation) before the convoy reached Ottawa — for example, the UK announced exactly this in mid-January (well before the convoy). Instead he politicized the issue with his “unacceptable views” speech, and pissed a lot of people off. Now, he has little that he can do directly (and the things above are probably off the table, since they require back-tracking) and is arguably making an even bigger mess of it (refusal to meet, going into hiding, now declaring emergency measures).
I suspect that the current rush to open in many US states is a recognition of the same underlying sentiment, and a desire to avoid political issues.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/covid-19-pandemic-restr...
The core purpose of liberal democracy, understood by any political science undergrad, is to _limit_ power - the tyranny of the majority, the executive branch etc...
Yet this is poorly understood by a class of individuals who exclusively do politics as a way of earning a living (ex. Trudeau, Liz Truss, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and so on).
Democracy is designed to make their jobs difficult. It is designed to force them to be thoughtful, measured, and generally non-extreme in any direction.
Things like the right to free speech, the freedom to assemble (protest) and the act of civil disobedience are designed to hold elected leaders accountable and ensure healthy checks and balances (ex. emergency powers for... covid! storms! protests!).
Trudeau and his ilk deeply envy China and their 'bug free' implementation of the political class free from a significant number of checks and balances. As such they have embraced the Rahm Emmanuel mantra of "never let a good crisis go to waste" - using any so-called emergency to radically curtail democratic freedoms with an end goal of generally making their diktats more easy to implement.
Think this is an exaggeration?
Any protest in Canada during emergency mandates related to covid was subject to pervasive (on the ground + drone + officer cams) video surveillance, facial recognition, cell phone geofence "warrants" and ultimately a "police contact" file opened with the local law enforcement branch and the CPIC database (shared with all five eyes and used for purposes such as to deny immigration / travel / visas).
The result?
Massive disincentive for the professional class (with something to lose) to engage in protest and a direct limiting of democratic features like the right to freely assemble, protest and engage in civil disobedience.
Also: China handled the pandemic way better than the West.
Source that China is not bug-free
"bug free" in the sense that the leaders of more authoritarian states are much less constrained by strong insitutional safeguards on individual rights, constitutions, etc. and that Trudeau and many politicians in western nations are jealous of their authoritatrian counterpart's ability to run roughshod over their citizenry
Right this second on the daily timescale. Tick tock.
- the vaccines are relatively new and long term effects are unknowable,
- efficacy against the current variant questionable and
- the current variant being mild enough even in unvaccinated populations
it is perfectly reasonable to have a significant percentage of the population to be unvaccinated, just to have a control for long term studies and for backup in case horrible side-effects come up in the long run.
The vaccine makers will try to argue otherwise and try to sell as much as possible, which is why the governments should have made strong commitments to make it strictly optional and prohibited any private attempts to make it mandatory.
Instead, we have seen most world politicians act as if they were completely bought out by the vaccine manufacturers.
One or the other.
Consider that the verbiage chosen is very easily construed as snark, or at worst a personal affront. If you meant neither, better words could have been chosen.
We Canadians had a fairly single issue election in the fall around vaccine mandates and the Liberal party won. The question is not “are mandates allowed” but “can a group be allowed to take cities hostage while trying to overthrow democratic rule.” The issuing of mandates was not even passed through fiat like an American executive order, this government is a minority government and at least one other party must support them to pass legislation.
One man’s authoritarianism view can be another man’s view of the state protecting it’s people. There certainly should be limits, but our election was highly focused on determining those limits (whether you like the FPTP system or not).
> 32.62% voted for Trudeau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election
“The People's Party was the only party opposing vaccine passports, mask mandates and lockdowns”
The PPC received 4.94% of the vote, which implies more than 90% of voters chose a party which in some way supported mandates.
The majority of vaccine mandates are provincial. The federal government has only issued them for workers in federally regulated industries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Canada... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_mandates_...
Welcome to a parliamentary system where coalitions are often required.
So yes, Trudeau has the will of the majority. Plus 2/3 of Canadians want the protest ended even with military force.
Right now the hospitals continue to be overloaded and so long as that is the case the government's health officials absolutely have a right to limit risky activities that are likely to explode the amount of people going to the hospital.
If governments recklessly open up here the system could fall apart. Already Alberta and Saskatchewan have conceded to the protestors and are winding down health measures so we'll see what happens. I hope the worst fears don't come to realization.
The hospitals here in Quebec have been overloaded and badly managed ever since I was of age to vote, and that's more than 20 years ago.
Most hospitals here have been operating above 100% capacity (you can find this information btw) for years. Waiting time in ER are crazy and the time to see a doctor have been reported to take in average 15 hours and up to 20 hours (pre-covid data in 2019) [1]. God forbid if you need to be hospitalized, as it can reach 24-48 hours.
Firing nurses over COVID measures before Christmas certainly didn't help, which is worth pointing out.
The politicians are trying to shift the blame of the bad healthcare systems happening under their watch to COVID.
[1]: https://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/2fe607e4-1054-4f10-9f56-703...
the minority is retaliating because they feel their rights have been violated.
i'm not taking sides and i'm not asking you to, but you're kidding yourself if you think these truckers are a greater existential threat to you and your way of life than your government with its self appointed "emergency" powers.
For good or ill, "tyranny of the majority" is exactly how democracy works - and it's only ever "tyranny" to those who don't like the democratic outcome. Did you mean constitutional democracy, perhaps? Most constitutions, definitely including Canada's, enumerate rights that are supposed to be beyond the reach of normal legislation or executive action, but that's the "constitutional" part rather than the "democracy" part.
> i'm not taking sides ... but you're kidding yourself if you think
That's taking a side.
And respectfully, no I'm unable to take sides because I don't have skin in the game.
That's also very different from "picking a side". Like watching the superbowl because you care about the outcome, but don't support one team over the other. You just want to see a good, fair game.
Having an ideological stance is also very different from "picking a side". I'm not automatically friends or allies with people who happen to share a view with me. I'm not automatically enemies with someone that holds different or opposite views.
Further you've conflated an objective observation with an ideological one. The sky is blue. Water is wet. Executive figures with armies are a greater threat to the people than the freight labor class. This claim doesn't need "proving", it's reinforced by history. Feel free to challenge yourself to find evidence to the contrary instead of trying to saddle the burden on someone else.
From https://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/news-why-did-justin-trudea...
"Trudeau expressed concern about the Indian security forces' attitude toward these peasant protesters and said that his government has always been a supporter of peaceful protests."
"Sikh vote bank politics matters in Canada. Sikh voters matter to Trudeau's Liberal Party, Conservative Party, and Jagmeet Singh's New Democratic Party. The Sikh population here is close to five lakhs. Sikh separatism or Khalistan has been an essential issue in the relations between India and Canada."
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...
"Sikh, numbering less than half a million, form the largest ethnic group among Indian-origin Canadians. All four of Trudeau’s Indian-origin ministers are Sikh, and Trudeau has publicly boasted how he has more Sikh ministers than Modi. Amarinder Singh, chief minister of the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab and himself a Sikh, has publicly accused Trudeau’s ministers of having sympathies with Canadian Sikh extremists who would like to see Indian Punjab separated from India into the state of Khalistan. Last year, Singh had refused to meet Trudeau’s defense minister, Harjit Singh Sajjan. All four Sikh ministers have recently visited India, and New Delhi would have liked it if Trudeau didn’t bring them along again. But for Trudeau, this trip is all about the Sikh vote in Canada."
"Canada’s position is that it cannot curtail the right to freedom of speech and expression of its Sikh citizens, but New Delhi wants Trudeau to publicly distance himself from Sikh separatists. "
> It was reported that they were being attacked and beaten in India.
The videos and news reports I saw show protestors being violent. They were using tractors to attempt to run over cops, beating cops with batons, walking around with swords etc. Some examples:
Cops jump off wall to escape protestors at Red Fort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qFKUtfvMc
Protestors using tractors against cops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7so5TwIMyM
Protestor attacking cop with sword: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEzMEzzb-94&t=53s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9feGjEr95nM
If anyone has any videos of the protestors being attacked which would prompt leaders of other nations to condemn, please share. I am from South India, and police using batons/water canons/tear gas is a standard practice even for small protests.
In the old days, police would fire live ammo at protests. I remember reading about "XX number of people shot in police firing" growing up all the time. Indian police of old didn't fuck around; they had been taught by the Brits how to crack down, and crack down hard they did.
If by "they" you mean the cops, then yes.
See this, for instance: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/11-held-...
"At about 8 p.m., police said a large farm tractor and a semi-truck attempted to ram a police vehicle. The officer in the vehicle was able to reposition and avoid the collision." https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-pro...
Lol, ok then. You can redefine words to mean different things than is commonly accepted all you want, but good luck trying that with a judge.
This novel use of trucks for protest has been enormously effective and I expect we'll see this replicated all over from now on.
Whereas in the past it took a mass movement of thousand upon thousands to block a bridge, now a few dozen people in trucks can do the same thing.
Trucks enable a protest to be incredibly paralyzing with a fraction of the amount of protestors.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/02/12/two-thirds-of-canadia...
The current approach seems to be a lot more mild than what the public would accept.
You have to remember that polls show a numerical outcome, not necessarily how it will filter through the various rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
2. Even those that were off were off by just a few percentage points. This is a 2 to 1 ratio.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sam-wang-p...
The odds set in 2016 by various groups were often wildly bearish on Trump winning, the polls were not so much. Political polls and surveys are usually not off the mark by all that much, especially if you have good demography data.
Surveys can be manipulated but they are also much better than flying blind with no data at all.
In the early 20th century, eugenic policies were considered progressive among many Canadians, including some socialists, feminists, farmers and psychiatrists. Their assumption was that Canadian society could be improved by encouraging reproduction among certain groups — particularly Anglo-Saxon Protestants — and discouraging or limiting reproduction among other groups, including Eastern European immigrants and, increasingly, Indigenous people. (Similarly, immigration policies like the Chinese head tax were aimed at limiting the population of Asian Canadians.)
Many prominent Canadians of that era were advocates of eugenics philosophy and eugenic sterilization, including Dr. E.W. McBride, Professor Carrie Derick and Dr. Helen MacMurchy. Support for eugenic sterilization was also expressed in the 1920s by many prominent Alberta women, including Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung. Maternal feminists like McClung, for example, argued that women were the mothers and guardians of their “race.” They therefore championed legislation, including sterilization, which aimed to curtail prostitution, alcoholism and “mental defectiveness.”"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization_in_Ca...
Jun 3, 2021 "Indigenous women still forced, coerced into sterilization" https://globalnews.ca/news/7920118/indigenous-women-steriliz...
How about... Life-Safe Code. DNA is effectively code, code is editable for the betterment of people, riiiight? And it's Life-Safe - like if you wanted to oppose Life-Safe Code you're saying "I want code that isn't safe for life to promulgate", which should help diminish the effectiveness of any rhetoric towards enshrining inherent rights that protect people's read/write/execution permissions over their own genetic code. And if you want Free Lifeware, or whatever, well, do you have problems with seatbelts? Because clearly there is a major inconsistency to your worldview if you accept seatbelts but won't promote the deployment of Life-Safe Code to all humans by any means deemed necessary.
Do you understand how much $ worth of mobilization has to happen to safely attempt to deal with people who say they’re going to start shooting at you in a city?
It’s a lot of time, money, & other resources. You can choose to cognitive dissonance this fact, but it doesn’t change it.
IMO, Canada didn’t use as much force as they should’ve to remove people who literally told them they were going to fight to the death instead of moving. Pretty big threat.
This lets the feds use their own police to enforce existing law, for example.
I just don't see reconciliation as a result of this emergencies act process.
My bets would be on a ratcheting up of controls over internet services, hyper aggressive financial services and tax enforcement, over the top surveillance exampples as threats, a miasma of staged and real "random" violence, escalating hit jobs and cancellations of the reasonable and principled, an official pivot to "fighting hate/terror" as a permanent emergency, etc.
The only question to me is whether a new class of plausible leaders emerges to replace the terrible ones responsible for this nonsense, or decades of low level conflict with a radicalized populace vs. a state that has more international support than national legitimacy. The only out is removing internal passport controls and mandates. The alterative is clear. Such interesting times.
> I could characterize it in a number of ways, but there is nobody left to persuade.
but then you characterise one side with:
> If you are aligned to the official narrative, the incentives are to double down to make sure nobody suspects you of disloyalty if it prevails.
which is downright biased.
Trying to avoid the black pill today by reminding myself that this is all being done to maintain a mandate to cross international borders, and what was probably the real prize (domestic vaccine passports for access to public life) seems to be hanging by an increasingly thin thread.
Not even a planck length of surprise to anyone.
>Given some obvious inevatabilities that flow downstream of this, what's the smart thing to do as an individual?
What a great question. Staying neutral? Join the protests on some side? At least try to understand what's happening?
>If you are aligned to the official narrative, the incentives are to double down to make sure nobody suspects you of disloyalty if it prevails.
I think when folks like Bill Maher call Trudeau out as sounding like Hitler... that was before he declared this last night. Even those on the left are seeing this as way too far. Something the convoy seems to have done is show how detached from reality Trudeau has become. He used to be a guy who would stand up in town halls and talk to anyone.
>f you are on the side of revolt, the official narrative is so increasingly divorced from reality as a means to signal it doesn't have to care about it - because this is how it says it is powerful - that it is impossible to sustain the dissonance to find any common ground or agreement in principle.
The mandates are falling around the world. Trudeau introduced new restrictions in January sparking this protest. It's clearly the wrong direction. The 'covid conspiracy theory' that this isn't about health. There hasnt been an emergency in quite some time. Trudeau's hand got laid down last night. This is no longer a conspiracy theory.
>I just don't see reconciliation as a result of this emergencies act process.
The Ottawa police have been unable to end the protests because they are legal peaceful protests. This emergencies act explicitly says you cant remove their internationally recognized human rights. Trudeau will find out shortly that the protesters are still not going anywhere, but worse force his hand. I will be quite surprised if the military doesnt get involved.
>My bets would be on a ratcheting up of controls over internet services, hyper aggressive financial services and tax enforcement, over the top surveillance exampples as threats, a miasma of staged and real "random" violence, escalating hit jobs and cancellations of the reasonable and principled, an official pivot to "fighting hate/terror" as a permanent emergency, etc.
No crystal ball needed to make these predictions. That's going to happen for sure.
>The only question to me is whether a new class of plausible leaders emerges to replace the terrible ones responsible for this nonsense, or decades of low level conflict with a radicalized populace vs. a state that has more international support than national legitimacy. The only out is removing internal passport controls and mandates. The alterative is clear. Such interesting times.
I have such respect for Liberal MP Joel Lightbound. A week ago he came out and said exactly this. Talk to the protesters, give them a reasonable roadmap to no restrictions. Stop the inflammatory attacks.
Nobody is saying you must drop the mandates tomorrow. But the reason Trudeau has gone this far is because there is no roadmap to no restrictions. Restrictions are staying. The protesters forced hishand and revealed this reality.
In this case, though, it's really just not there.
> Even those on the left are seeing this as way too far.
Generally, people are [sympathetic](https://globalnews.ca/news/8610727/ipsos-poll-trucker-convoy...) to the occupiers, but I wouldn't read too much into that--I'm in the large minority that have "sympathy" for them, but I want them gone as soon as possible.
Canadians say their opinion is unchanged, or that they're more likely to support vaccine mandates because of the occupations and blockades. A small majority want mass arrests and criminal charges, and significant majority want it to be ended by force. [source](https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine...).
Indeed, rather than this being "way too far," for most Canadians, it's not far enough.
> The Ottawa police have been unable to end the protests because they are legal peaceful protests.
The occupation is in violation of several court injunctions, which makes it illegal. As for peaceful? I'd disagree--there's been too many incidents of violence for me to characterize it that way, but frankly that's secondary when you're in systematic violation of court orders (without even considering all of the civil violations like parking, noise, public defecation, etc.)
> the reason Trudeau has gone this far is because there is no roadmap to no restrictions. Restrictions are staying. The protesters forced hishand and revealed this reality.
Every single province had a pre-existing deconfinement plan. They've been accelerated as the hospital situation continues to improve.
I love reading /r/ontario and /r/canada. Obviously cant comment like I do here without getting banned from those subreddits. So their bubble literally sees the truckers as a military occupation that needs to military to violently remove them. That's certainly not a misrepresentation of the general consensus there.
The threads about people killing and driving into protestors got applauds.
So certainly very polarized.
>Generally, people are [sympathetic](https://globalnews.ca/news/8610727/ipsos-poll-trucker-convoy...) to the occupiers, but I wouldn't read too much into that--I'm in the large minority that have "sympathy" for them, but I want them gone as soon as possible.
People generally support what they represent. They look at the global trend of everyone dropping restrictions and they want the same. However, how many Canadians believe these protesters are also racists, sexists, and white supremacists? The smearing is going to have an effect.
>Indeed, rather than this being "way too far," for most Canadians, it's not far enough.
Yes, it seems very polar. Trudeau's in the tanks polls wise because the people who believe the smears think this is a military occupation that needs violence to solve.
>The occupation is in violation of several court injunctions, which makes it illegal.
Like what? That's the thing about peaceful assembly charter right. There's virtually no case law. Which means you can't really injunct against it. You can go after them for bylaw violations that dont involve people. You can ticket a car that is parked illegally. An illegally parked car is not something that makes it a military occupation or even for that matter illegal.
>As for peaceful? I'd disagree--there's been too many incidents of violence for me to characterize it that way, but frankly that's secondary when you're in systematic violation of court orders (without even considering all of the civil violations like parking, noise, public defecation, etc.)
That's the problem with fundamental human rights. I have a right to peacefully protest. Someone else showing up and being violent doesn't remove my right. That's what fuels counter protesters to be violent. City bylaws also have absolutely no bering here.
>Every single province had a pre-existing deconfinement plan. They've been accelerated as the hospital situation continues to improve.
Which will certainly appease many of the protesters to go home. Not all will go home. This legislation that Trudeau just engaged is specifically designed not to stop peaceful protesters. This means Trudeau has to pull the trigger on military eventually.
It's not smearing to accurately describe them based on their actions and words. We have a free press in Canada and they're right to report on the backgrounds of the organizers. They're holding press conferences demanding the dissolution of the government that we just elected, the organizers (not just participants) have documented white supremacist rants. This isn't popular, and I'm not surprised most Canadians haven't fallen for what some people on the internet are trying to represent them as.
> Like what? That's the thing about peaceful assembly charter right
Repeating "peaceful assembly" over and over again doesn't change the nature of the occupation. Constant 150 decibel noise is damaging to health and well being. Stockpiling illegal arms is not legal. Threats to bodily harm are not peaceful. Attempted arson is not peaceful. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "city bylaws have no [bearing]", we're all subject to the same laws.
Re injunctions:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/protesters-violate-cou...
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/judge-hears-argument...
https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/judge-grants-injunction-against-no...
You can disagree, but the courts have decided, and they are the authority on legality.
I think the most interesting point is this:
> I have a right to peacefully protest. Someone else showing up and being violent doesn't remove my right.
That's absolutely correct. If you're not violating noise limits, not parked illegally, and comply with the same laws as everyone else, you can ABSOLUTELY continue demonstrating. The Emergencies Act doesn't change that.
We seem to consume different news sources. It's remarkable to read responses today. Shock from the far-left to the far-right. This isn't political anymore. Here's a Libertarian socialist antifascist with 190k followers on twitter: https://twitter.com/VaushV/status/1493511896351211520
As you are aware, the emergencies act doesn't allow the government to really do anything different than what has already happened to this peaceful protest. It doesn't allow them to remove any charter rights.
What's about to happen will infringe the rights of the protesters. Under the act...
Compensation
48 (1) Subject to subsection (2) and the regulations made under section 49, the Minister shall award reasonable compensation to any person who suffers loss, injury or damage as a result of any thing done, or purported to be done, under any of Parts I to IV or any proclamation, order or regulation issued or made thereunder.
When Trudeau finally orders the protest to end and infringes their rights. The Crown will be paying significant compensation to the protesters.
These responses are non-sequitors and proclaim with confidence what will happen in the future (as though we have a crystal ball). This seems like a good time to stop engaging.
Well you jumped into this conversation providing a link saying people are sympathetic to the freedom convoy but 'not to read into it'. I believe I have been fair in my discussion.
Popularity is fairly irrelevant. It was extremely popular to imprison japanese canadians during world war 2. The point of your right to peaceful protest is to ensure your grievances are heard. If the government wishes to ignore the protest and not respond, that's fine, you can keep on protesting. This convoy has been tremendously successful in their protest thus far. Their grievances are being heard.
As for the legality of the military occupation. I don't believe you have provided sufficient argument to justify qualifying it as a military occupation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupation If you would like to justify this I am willing to listen. I would agree that a military occupation would be illegal.
Trying to suggest that some municipal bylaws make it 'illegal' is certainly not something even in the realm of being able to remove your charter right to peaceful assembly.
>These responses are non-sequitors and proclaim with confidence what will happen in the future (as though we have a crystal ball).
Lets be realistic here. My predictions are hardly crystal ball worthy. The more practical response to this declaration by Trudeau. This act or equivalent was deployed during the world wars. Which is appropriate. Trudeau's father deployed it during the october crisis but there was bombs and death occurring. There's reasonableness that can be debated with Pierre Trudeau's use. This misuse by Trudeau is what got them to remove that legislation and replace it enshrining the requirement to maintain human rights.
>This seems like a good time to stop engaging.
Here's the thing. Bill Maher got to associating Trudeau with Hitler and what Hitler did. There's an awful lot of those predictions today from the left and right wings. I haven't gone there. I have been trying to be reasonable.
If you think I am wrong with my predictions, I bet you think those predictions are even more wrong? Frankly, if my predictions are wrong, I'm headed that direction comparing Trudeau to Hitler.
https://twitter.com/TrueNorthCentre/status/14933475618764718...
> As of today, financial institutions with be “authorized or directed” to “prohibit the use of property” or freeze accounts - personal or corporate- if the institution suspects that the account holder is financing illegal blockades.
https://twitter.com/TheMarieOakes/status/1493344048932966405
I am absolutely ashamed of what my Government is doing right now. Our PM was singing a different tune when the farmers in my home country were protesting in India. Or the Hong Kong protests. Or the pipeline protests in Canada.
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said politicians should not be telling the police how to deal with protesters and that resolution should come through dialogue"
Millions of dollars in damage by these protestors (railway above). Protests for me, but not for thee.
Vaguely remember stuff like:
"Your right to freedom of speech stops where it harms others" (hate speech)
"Your right to bodily autonomy stops where you can harm others" (vax mandates)
"Your right to protest stops where ... ?"
These are all nuanced, sadly the Canadian government can override its Bill of Rights whenever they please under temporary 3 year Emergency Measures.
"Don't like first amendment speech? Just suspend the constitution!"
We should start processing asylum claims from the north...
…and then face elections with this track record, hence why this is the first time this bill has been invoked in 50 years.
Regardless of the outcome of this situation, the current few weeks _will_ be taught in Canadian schools for the next decades.
It’s time for Canada to rewrite the Constitution and to enshrine some inalienable rights and freedoms.
You might also find that Canadians as a whole want a balance between public order and individual freedom that tilts more toward the public order end of the spectrum than you'd like.
1. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/over-300-cops-injured-in...
2. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/fir-names-six...
3. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/man-burnt-to-deat...
4. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/body-with-severed-...
Trudeau had been advocating via the WTO for the removal of farming subsidies & MSP for Indian Farmers for years at that point.[1]
If he had any semblance of moral consistency, then he would have been an ardent supporter of the farm bill.
[1] https://theprint.in/diplomacy/trudeau-backs-farmers-protest-...
> When protests were happening in India this is what Trudeau had to say: "Let me remind you, Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue. We’ve reached out through multiple means to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns. This is a moment for all of us to pull together,"Justin Trudeau said
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/situation-is-concern...
“I would be remiss if I didn’t start by recognising the news coming from India about the protest by farmers. The situation is concerning. We are all very worried about family and friends. We know that’s a reality for many of you. Let me remind you, Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue. We’ve reached out through multiple means to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns. This is a moment for all of us to pull together.”
He offers absolutely no opinion on the policy in questions. You will find the other quotes of Canadian government officials do likewise. Do you understand what I mean?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-premiers-cabinet-1.... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/justin-trudeau-invokes-em...
etc.
These are not peaceful protests. It's an occupation backed by our extreme right wing and significantly funded by people in other countries (cough). It's been terrorizing local residents night and day. Too loud to sleep, get harassed if you leave your house, and in one case the occupiers attempted to light an apartment building on fire and trap the residents inside.
Our local municipal police and council could not have done a worse job in the early days of this situation, and now the occupiers are well entrenched.
The occupation is also easy to mimic. A small group closed down a $300mil/day border crossing into the US. Another blockade in Alberta has now had 12 arrests and two caches of weapons siezed.
Before anyone brings up BLM, I will say I don't agree with violent protests on either side and that BLM protests were peaceful here in Ottawa.
As an aside, I actually had a lot of respect for Sloly when he was in TO, so I am completely baffled why he didn’t keep this under control. Any ideas why this went so badly in Ottawa?
I really don't understand either how fast and how far this got away from the control of the police. At the start, OPS leadership saw this as a valid protest and gave away a ton of ground from the get go. Ottawa downtown does not help in that there are 5 different authorities and their areas overlap: OPS, OPP, RCMP, NCC, PPS, plus the police in Gatineau. But the response from the police has been very disheartening. I think they have a chance of ending this during the week, but on the weekend when the autonomous zone grows to 5000+ people who are there to party and bring their kids it's a whole other nightmare.
I am not surprised, this is the usual hypocrisy of the far left wing do gooders of the western world. Anyone who opposes them is a "violent fascist" even if there is no real violence and their own supporters turning violent are social justice warriors fighting the inequality.
Trudeau is a pussy and a tyrant and I hope the honking continues and truckers wont back off. Indian community in USA and India would gladly contribute to the protestors. For FREEDOM.
The truckers are NOT protesting against the vaccine itself, and if you believe that they are, I would highly encourage you to find different sources for news.
The truckers are protesting the idea that the government can force them to take the vaccine against their will.
I would hope that people could find some more common ground on this, since there is an almost identical debate happening around the idea of bodily autonomy:
Almost nobody, or functionally/practically nobody, is "pro abortion". People who are "pro choice" are saying that they don't believe the government should be able to force women to carry a child until birth, because they believe it violates their right to bodily autonomy.
The truckers are saying the same thing. They aren't "anti vaccine", they are against the government forcing them to take a vaccine, because they believe it violates their right to bodily autonomy.
These give even more ammunition to the skeptics.
Anyone can believe anything they like but none are required to be so credulous as to believe that the protests are simply about vaccine mandates given the large quantity of published evidence that the organizers and participants have a bevy of other agendas they would like to promote.
“Dissolution of the government” has innocuous meaning in a parliamentary system, where “the government” refers to the executive authority of the current party or coalition in power in parliament: https://sencanada.ca/en/sencaplus/how-why/what-is-dissolutio.... It’s about as dramatic as a recall election in certain American states. Maybe even less so because dissolution of the government technically happens after every Parliamentary election
You’re deliberately using unfamiliarity with the term to suggest the truckers are calling for overthrow of the governing institutions of the country—what Americans mean when they refer to “the government.”
I was being overly generous in my language by implying that they were just calling for the government to voluntarily resign when in fact they are asking for a non-constitutional coup. I was trying to err on the side of being too fair to their position.
Both the Canadian Senate and the Governor General are, in principle, there to be a check on the House of Commons. Even if asking them to override the actions of the Trudeau government in this context isn’t legally viable, that doesn’t make it an attempt to “overthrow” the government.
In the US, our Supreme Court exercises sweeping powers to strike down acts of Congress based on perceived individual rights. That’s not an “overthrow” of the government.
I did not call this a coup and I respectfully do not regard the requests outlined as "drawing on reserve powers" in the regular Canadian constitutional order. The appointment of citizens committees to govern would clearly be an illegal act.
I am trying to engage in good faith to the best of my ability on this topic, that's all I can do.
> I was being overly generous in my language by implying that they were just calling for the government to voluntarily resign when in fact they are asking for a non-constitutional coup.
People use words to invoke the associated connotations. When people accuse truckers of asking for a coup, they are deliberately drawing a comparison to this: https://www-gannett--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/www.gann.... It’s an attempt to demonize and dehumanize political opposition. By drawing a comparison to armed insurgents, the point is to justify disproportionate government responses. This tactic is common in Bangladesh for that purpose. Sad to see it happening in North America.
And again, I am being as generous as I can be, here is a supercut of Pat King again and again saying there needs to be violence to reach his political ends.
https://twitter.com/Peterlad21/status/1489600404681756672?t=...
It is what it is.
So you've never heard the term "Bloodless Coup" ?
Petitioning the existing organs of government, even with a shoddy legal theory, isn’t a coup, bloodless or otherwise.
From the article:
A Memorandum of Understanding posted to the group’s website sets out a framework to effectively dissolve the federal government in favour of a “Citizens of Canada Committee” composed of the Senate, the Governor General and whoever else Canada Unity selects.
This committee of entirely unelected figures would then “instruct all levels of the Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal governments to immediately cease and desist all unconstitutional human rights, discriminatory and segregated actions.”
If enacted, the MOU would represent an unprecedented dissolution of the federal system and put an abrupt end to 155 years of continuous parliamentary rule (a record that happens to rank us as one of the world’s oldest democracies).
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/what-the-truckers-want-and-...
Every protest movement encounters the problem of leadership and managing consensus but the core group is quite small that stays during the week, if they were not aligned with the self-appointed leadership it would be very clear to any outside observer.
There are public declarations of moderation but the Zello and Telegram channels operated by the leadership consistently offer assertions of positions consistent with the original MOU., culminating in efforts like this: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/governor-generals-off...
Basically means "a no-confidence vote"
It would be much more reasonable for them to be simply demanding the normal resignation of the government and new elections, but we just had an election, so I presume they are well aware of the fact that the result would not be favourable to their goals.
In the case of abortion, the right of the fetus to its life should be balanced with the bodily autonomy of the mother.
You can make a much stronger argument against mandatory Covid vaccination, since it is mostly about an adult making decisions about their own health.
The pro-vax mandate argument claims that bodily autonomy should be violated because it supposedly prevents a 0.05% chance of death of an innocent person. (usually adult)
Someones choice to not get vaccinated HAS led to significant deaths at this point. Via overloaded health systems, spreading the disease and of course, the much higher likelihood of death for those who are unvaccinated.
Drawing a parallel to abortion is absurd.
I, for one, am honored to give up some liberties so that I may help others.
The problem is, there are no rights to be healthy and not to catch a respiratory disease and the virus doesn't threaten the existence of the state with a 0.05% mortality rate in old and sick people.
> I, for one, am honored to give up some liberties so that I may help others.
I'm not sure to decide if you're a troll or not.
What about sodomy? Receptive anal intercourse is an order of magnitude more likely to spread HIV/AIDS[1] than vaginal intercourse. Maybe what happens in the bedroom should be "curtailed for the common good"?
I think it's a bit like second hand smoke vs. first hand smoke. I think it's entirely reasonable to object to second hand smoke (refusing vaccinations while insisting on participating in society) in all forms while supporting an individual's right to first hand smoke (pregnancy/sodomy).
Consider the prevalence of casual hookups, and how long the incubation period is, I say the chance is pretty high. If anything, the aids epidemic is evidence that it can spread despite requiring intimate contact. That said, for the purposes of this argument I'd be okay with limiting the argument to "ban sodomy for non-married couples" to rule out the "third, unrelated party" element.
Also, just use a condom.
You being pregnant does not increase the risk of my pregnancy.
* government control over media (especially which is non-christian, relating to LGTBQ subjects/characters, covering the history of racial discrimination, etc)
* freedom to humanely end one's own life out of a conscious, informed decision to do so
* the right to wear as little or as much clothing as you want, including covering your head entirely
* a woman having easy, unrestricted access to contraceptives and abortion
* immigration policies (the right to travel freely in search of a better life)
* the death penalty
* how freely you should be able to end another person's life (ie very loose carry and self defense laws)
* easy, accommodating access to voting
What is the incremental increase in covid deaths attributable to one person choosing not to get vaccinated, accounting for the fact that vaccination decreases but doesn’t eliminate the chances of passing on covid? What’s that compared to the incremental deaths caused by other activities?
I don’t know why you’d call that a “fringe belief.” Fully 38% of the public holds that view: https://www.wbur.org/npr/730183531/poll-majority-want-to-kee....
I suspect when most people assert that “life doesn’t begin at conception” they’re not referring to the literal beginning of human life, but the metaphysical question of when “human life that justifies legal protection” begins. That I agree is complex.
Science at its core aims to define things: hypotheses are proposed and proven/disproven in search of pinning down clearly defined rules and patterns.
Is gravity just an assumption that differs for each of us?
If you named it vticarg instead and defined the word "gravity" as loud noises, that would be fine scientifically.
Indeed you will find "gravity" defined different ways in different papers. Sometimes it's Newtonian, sometimes relativity, sometimes MOND.
Are viruses alive? What about robots? Or cities? Or earth?
It's a philosophical question and not something that can be decided by experiment.
I’d be curious to know the type of apolitical source of news you consume, considering the flat out incorrect claims in your post.
The worst effect of the covid pandemic has been whipping up opposing mass hysterias.
Both sides are wrong. Take the shot or don't if you want to. Suffer or enjoy the consequences of your decision. Nothing in life is justified now. Nothing in life was justified ever. Nothing in life needs to be justified.
The whole universe doesn't even need to exist. Instead there could just be nothing. But we worry about our stupid vaccine fears and mask fears while the feral human is increasingly domesticated into docile livestock.
In my province, we have to show our "vaccine pass" to go to the liquor store, the hardware store, I don't know what else, I dont go to stores anymore (I have all 3 vaccine shots). We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and that has just emboldened "leaders" to push even tighter restrictions. The protests are about the horrible place our country has become, they have nothing to do with belief or disbelief in vaccines as a concept.
And I have to add, if there was ever a vaccine to disbelieve in, it is this one, I mean honestly, it "prevents severe infection" - sure, is that justification for state compelled vaccination?
Yes it is.
I wonder
I wonder what the reason could be.
Wow what a pickle.
Well I just can't figure this puzzle out.
Well, in my province it's not a problem. There you prove point #1, this is not a federal issue. What province are you in? In my province leaders aren't pushing tighter restrictions.
It doesn't matter what your grievances are, you don't get to park your truck in the middle of the street and break the law. Not in this country. Whether they "right" or "wrong" doesn't even factor into this.
I think, and so has most of the population during this pandemic, that Canada did a great job balancing public health with the needs of individuals. Ofcourse this varies province to province but as a whole. Better than many other places.
There is no "state compelled vaccination". The right to cross the border while not being subject to any restriction is not a god given right. But you don't want to get vaccinated, great, don't drive your truck across the border. For most of the pandemic truckers were allowed freely across the border while others (like me) were not with no quarantine or vaccine requirements. As Delta rose to dominance the rules changed (the change happened Nov 18th, 2021!).
I wouldn't even rule out state compelled vaccinations for all under some scenarios.
So yeah, the guys with the Nazi flags, the confederate flags, the US flags, they're all Trudeau's agents. Right.
Flying the Canadian flag in this sort of divisive protest is honestly evidence enough of who we're dealing with here. You don't get to appropriate the flag, you don't get to appropriate the term "freedom". If you stand with those guys then it's clear who you stand with. Criticism and healthy discussion is one thing, this is another. And I agree the health measures should be gradually removed and the pandemic is basically over.
" Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), issued the following statement:
"Twenty-four hours after International Holocaust Remembrance Day and on The National Day of Remembrance of the Québec City Mosque Attack and Action against Islamophobia, there are Nazi flags being flown in public, in Canada, on Parliament Hill. This should be horrifying to all Canadians."
"
The truckers are and have always been free to choose not to be vaccinated (or, as their leaders put it, be subject to medical experiments). By choosing not to take the vaccine they are shunned from participating in activities in which they would put the general public at greater risk of more severe forms of the disease. They have the freedom; what they want is to not suffer the consequences of exercising that freedom.
To emphasize their demands to not experience the consequences of their decisions they have driven thousands of miles to a larger city (population of Ottawa-Gatineau is about 1.5 million) and proceeded to reign anarchy and lawlessness on the innocent denizens of that location and call for inappropriate physical interactions with the prime minster who has no jurisdiction of provincial health matters but is hated and despised by this group not because of what he had said or done but just because of who he is.
Those brutes are just selfish and infantile. They have spent 3 weeks invading and partying in someone else's home. They have a right to protest without fear of government repercussions, but their actions overstepped the bounds of protest appropriate to their legitimate complaint long ago and has veered into lawlessness for the sake of lawlessness. They are no different than a grade-school bully trying to get everyone's lunch money in the playground.
What these mothertruckers should do is just say sorry and go home. It's time.
Here, it's important to understand that vaccines do much more than protect a singe trucker from getting sick. It makes the population more resistant to the disease and lowers the infection rate. Low infection rates keep people who really can't be vaccinated safer. And, perhaps most importantly, it lowers the chance of dangerous mutations from developing and being selected.
Truckers that refuse to vaccinate are making a choice that affects all of us. It's not up to them to allow the pandemic to continue forever.
With all of that said, I hope that it's also clear why we can't compare the decision to not get vaccinated with the choice of getting an abortion.
- These aren't peaceful protests, they're an occupation by a fringe group
- You're allowed to protest, but not have an impact on the economy
- You're allowed to protest, but not block critical infrastructure
- An as of yet unattributed violent act was committed during the midst of the protests, therefore they are not peaceful protests, they are violent extremists
I sympathize with people living in Ottawa, it must be loud, frightening, and angering to be occupied by an unruly protest. I don't want to make a comparison to other protest movements of recent memory and how they were handled. Demonstrations are always unpleasant and inconvenient for bystanders, that's almost the entire point.
Do we want demonstrations contained by free speech zones as were so controversial during the 2000s? If we can freeze bank accounts of demonstrators participating in protests that are deemed illegal, what else can we do? Should the government force Apple and Google to lock people out of their phones because they are using them to coordinate illegal protests? Lock them out of email and social media? Ban businesses in general from serving them? I don't believe the government would go that far, but how far do we want them to go? Freezing bank accounts is too far for me.
Try to remember that the government rarely yields back powers we give them, but they do change hands. What we see here today will be used against movements you support. Maybe next year.
1) The "Common Denominator Fallacy" accepts both of an argument or position on the grounds that both sides share at least some common assumptions. In this case, you're attempting to draw common ground between the issues of bodily autonomy involved in abortion, and the protester's views of bodily autonomy w.r.t. vaccine mandates. This is incorrect; someone having an abortion or not fundamentally only affects that person; it does not cause someone else to get sick or die. Not being vaccinated, in some circumstances, does.
I don't support mandatory vaccination for all jobs (e.g. cutting down trees outside can be done just fine if you're not vaccinated), but part of living in a society is accepting certain restrictions on oneself to support the common good. The argument being made by the Canadian government is that vaccine mandates are such a restriction.
2) Nobody is "forcing" anyone to take a vaccine. People may choose to not be vaccinated, but if they make that choice, then they must live with the outcomes of that choice. In this case, truckers are perfectly capable of choosing not to be vaccinated, but the outcome of that choice is not being allowed to cross borders. Not "lose their job" - just live with certain restrictions on their behaviour as a result of their choice.
(Side note: owners of trucking companies may choose to terminate an employee for not being able to drive to the USA if that's a job requirement, but that's at the discretion of the company and is not mandated by the government. They could, for example, also choose to retask unvaccinated employees to drive routes that are not subject to mandates.)
---
Trudeau will not be calling in the military, he said.(...)
The move will “supplement provincial and territorial capacity to address the blockades,” Trudeau said, and will afford more powers to local police forces.(...) The police will be given more tools to restore order in places where public assemblies can constitute illegal and dangerous activities, such as blockades and occupations as seen in Ottawa, the Ambassador Bridge and elsewhere. These tools include strengthening their ability to impose fines or imprisonment,” he said. (...) The measures will be “time-limited, geographically targeted as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address,” he said. “The Emergencies Act will be used to strengthen and support law enforcement agencies at all levels across the country. This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people’s jobs and restoring confidence in our institutions.”
Trudeau said the move could be used to render “essential services” such as contracting trucks to tow vehicles blocking streets.(..)
Financial institutions will be “authorized or directed to take measures, including regulating and prohibiting the use of property to fund or support illegal blockades,” Trudeau said. (...) The act will also enable the RCMP to enforce municipal bylaws and provincial offences, Trudeau said. (..) Trudeau said he wanted to be “equally clear” about what the act does not entail, and said he would not be calling in the Canadian Forces.(..)
“We’re not suspending the fundamental rights or overriding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we are not limiting people’s freedom of speech, we are not limiting freedom of peaceful assembly (or) preventing people from exercising their right to protest legally,” Trudeau said.
Something tells me finding replacements wouldn’t be hard to do.
It's also more difficult safely braking/turning/accelerating a very heavy load like a loaded trailer as opposed to a passenger vehicle.
Some local trucking businesses in my area are training people to drive since there's a shortage of drivers. It takes a while to get someone to the point where they can get their commercial driver's license.
They already haven't worked in a few weeks. If they keep not working, it won't change anything.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/0...
https://theconversation.com/before-9-11-australia-had-no-cou...
In the begining we were promised the vaccine will end the pandemic (supposedly downgrading covid as endemic). Vaccination does not prevent infection, does not prevent virus spread but why not make the goal at that? The vaccines are not fully approved yet, there are waivers for compensation if you get a sideeffect so effectively medical insurance treats the vaccine as medical experiment.
As we can see, a nontrivial part of the population refuses to take part in the medical experiment and so far civilised countries respected that, this freedom was guaranteed by human rights, constitutions and other minor laws. To enforce vaccination mandate we need to rollback liberal democracy citizen freedoms back some 500 years and it won't be easy winning them back.
The vaccine we are forcing on people is targetting the original virus from 2019, since then we went through many variants. We are not forcing everyone vaccinates for 2019 seasonal flu. Israel vaccinated everyone 4x and that did not stop the pandemic.
Surely imposing martial law and effectively marking everyone unvaccinated or vaccinated more than 5 months prior as 2nd grade citizen without access to public areas is disproportional reaction to the dangers of Omicron.
Some countries Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, UK? are already treating COVID as endemic, where is the rationale in some countries insisting to rollback liberal democracy with the vaccination mandate??
It seems like (maybe it's a polarization thing) its becoming
more common for all sides to want to go straight to the
(thankfully only metaphorical) nuclear option to try and
end situations.
This blockade has been ongoing for weeks. Maybe you only just heard about today, but they certainly didn't go "straight to the nuclear option."
Also, what do you mean by "nuclear option" anyway? To me, that would be the most extreme possible response. Nobody is saying the current situation is great, but there is clearly a lot of room left for escalation. (May it never come to that)
Calling the current state of affairs "the nuclear option" is disingenuous at best.
Could be, but to extend the metaphor giving yourself the political option to call in the military is certainly taking the safety off the big red button.
Everything is "unprecedented" and the "biggest threat to society" and other sensational labels.
I think it may come from the media who tend to sensationalize often?
> In the late 1940s, the Conservative Party utilised and encouraged growing public anger at rationing, scarcity, controls, austerity and government bureaucracy to rally middle-class supporters and build a political comeback that won the 1951 general election.
people get war fatigue all the same.
Further an authoritarian regime is perfectly sound as long as they're perfectly behaved. You shouldn't protest against that, agreed?
in the USA the flu vaccine is not mandated either, not even in hospitals.
further covid is not apples to apples with measles and smallpox. covid mutates. the vaccines don't achieve herd immunity. those diseases target the young while covid targets the old and infirm.
covid does not affect everyone equally.
zero-tolerance and one-size-fits-all was a mistake.
While invocation of the Emergencies Act is always concerning, it's pretty clearly warranted here. There's always chance for abuse, but Trudeau's minority government is on thin ice and if they cross any lines they're as good as gone.
I can only imagine the chaos that would unfold if this was happening in Washington, D.C., but it's not. I know some outraged Canadians who support the protests/blockades, but most of them are either extreme right wing (a comically small population compared to USA) or heavily biased through being directly impacted by restrictions (like the travel industry).
The vast majority of my friends, family, colleagues, strangers on the street, business owners I interact with, lawyers, CEOs, investors, healthcare workers, waiters, bartenders, bus drivers, teachers... are all in strong support of putting an end to the disruption, and in favour of vaccine passports, mask mandates, gathering restrictions, etc. to protect public health.
Compared to the USA, Canadians care much more about what's best for the collective whole than about personal freedoms. This is simply a case of a small minority causing problems for the majority, amplified by the fact that the USA leans towards supporting the protestors.
In Canada we call that a plurality. As for wether it’s warranted and 8 of 10 premiers are against its invocation in their provinces.
An overwhelming majority of Canadians support political parties whose platforms prioritize public health over personal freedoms. Even the conservative party supported some mandates!
It is indeed a small minority.
Probably also why the Conservatives got more votes than the Liberals (that and a lot of Canadians don't want a leader who wears blackface, I mean when you're talking fringe minorities with unacceptable views, doesn't wearing blackface to the mall sort of top the list?)
Just personally, what seems more unacceptable to you, wearing blackface, or going to a peaceful protest to protest people being fired to get vaccinated for a disease they already had?
8 out of 10 premiers oppose everything Trudeau does, because they're members of opposing political parties. News at 11.
I'm in the US. I follow 2 Canadians (that I know of), AvE, who seems to strongly support the Truckers, but he seems to lean right. The other is Julie Nolke, who is unlikely to ever mention it.
Getting a clear picture of it was something I would have counted on the media to do in my youth, 40 years ago, but they have proven themselves unreliable and quite deceitful when they have motive to be. (Iraq invasion anyone?)
The Canadian government seems to be over-playing its hand, and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This will not do anything but erode the trust in the government, which is bad for everyone.
----
Here in the US, I've had my shots, and wear a mask in public. I've been dealing with Long Covid, so I take this stuff more seriously than the average person.
Our government here in the US has failed to manage its message in a coherent manner. We're told to wear masks, but far to many people here, when they do wear masks, use them as chin straps, or have their nose hanging out. People have given up, and now are just going through the motions.
Covid is endemic now, and even this failure won't push through the single payer system the US so desperately needs for its own National Security.
As for "vaccine passports"... I've heard the term, but have never had cause to deal with them.
----
I miss Canada... we were there a few times before Bush got stupid and required passports. 8( Almost $600 just to get 3 passports is absurd.
Canadian here. Americans are concerned about Canadian democracy falling. 43 out of 50 states have no mandates; the remaining 7 are clear political lines. Many other countries in the world never had restrictions. Many who did have also dropped them. It's unreasonable for a high vaccinated country to remain so restricted. The smearing of these protests has been extreme to the point that the world is commenting how bad it is in Canada.
>While invocation of the Emergencies Act is always concerning, it's pretty clearly warranted here. There's always chance for abuse, but Trudeau's minority government is on thin ice and if they cross any lines they're as good as gone.
It's absolutely not warranted but also completely invalid. You cant use the act to shutdown peaceful protests. Several premiers who should have been consulted as per requirements of the act are publicly opposing this.
>I can only imagine the chaos that would unfold if this was happening in Washington, D.C., but it's not. I know some outraged Canadians who support the protests/blockades, but most of them are either extreme right wing (a comically small population compared to USA) or heavily biased through being directly impacted by restrictions (like the travel industry).
That's quite the characterization. Absolutely not accurate compared to my understanding.
>The vast majority of my friends, family, colleagues, strangers on the street, business owners I interact with, lawyers, CEOs, investors, healthcare workers, waiters, bartenders, bus drivers, teachers... are all in strong support of putting an end to the disruption, and in favour of vaccine passports, mask mandates, gathering restrictions, etc. to protect public health.
Of your friends.
https://twitter.com/AngusReid/status/1488044322192695297
In reality polls show somewhere between 50% and 75% of Canadians support the protests and think restrictions must end. you know... like the rest of the world is doing.
>Compared to the USA, Canadians care much more about what's best for the collective whole than about personal freedoms. This is simply a case of a small minority causing problems for the majority, amplified by the fact that the USA leans towards supporting the protestors.
You seem to be living in a political bubble. Out of curiosity, do you believe Trudeau when he says the protesters are 'fringe minority of racists, sexists, and white supremacists?'
https://mobile.twitter.com/AngusReid/status/1493113691704725...
> 22% of respondents think the protesters should continue
Sure doesn't seem like 50-75%?
Of CPC voters, they're split on support of protests.
If you think a peaceful protest involves blocking access to ambulances and hospitals, defacing statues with swastikas, and honking very loud horns non-stop for weeks, then I don't think it's possible to have an amicable conversation.
Erin otoole fell spectacularly. Peter mckay not only supports violence against the blockade, he applauds what Trudeau did last night. Piere Polievre seems to be the only reasonable position. We shall see what happens at their leadership.
>If you think a peaceful protest involves blocking access to ambulances and hospitals,
That hasnt happened here at all. That was something months ago that lasted for all of a day before the protesters willingly left. There have been absolutely no blockades like this at all for this. You are misconstruing different protests.
>defacing statues with swastikas
This absolutely hasnt happened. You seem to be consuming some very poor media.
https://www.newsweek.com/canadian-protesters-face-investigat...
But wait lets evaluate.
https://twitter.com/mackaytaggart/status/1487486909131677698
This is the defacement. Some Canadian flags. The protesters themselves came and cleaned this up after it came out.
Your comment that they have been defaced with swasitkas is wrong. So what about the swastikas? Lets be realistic, it was litrally 1 guy with a nazi flag and journalists coincidentally were able to follow him around to get pictures. Hence the media saying 'swastikas were seen'. In the end we actually discovered the truckers are quite diverse and there's absolutely no nazis amongst them. So frankly, if you're seeing swastikas, that's the counter protesters or journalists.
> and honking very loud horns non-stop for weeks, then I don't think it's possible to have an amicable conversation.
The narrative that these sikh and black truckers are white supremacists has fallen internationally. https://notthebee.com/article/come-and-laugh-with-me-at-the-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWU8Bi8FqQg
This 'racist' narrative is mocked even by the left-wing. Though I concede that honking horns in downtown capital cities should be banned.
On one hand, if the protests really were peaceful, I do not believe the government should shut them down.
On the other hand, I’ve heard the protests have caused millions in trade to be shut down which I would not consider a peaceful act. If some non-citizen entity shut down millions in trade, I don’t think it would be viewed as peaceful.
Should the right to peaceful protest include the right to halt trade at this scale? Are the reports of halted trade overblown?
Since when did economic disruption become violence? I just don't understand. It makes zero sense to redefine violence to mean "something that inconveniences me, that I disagree with", Where does that end?
When next the liberals want to protest something - an oil pipeline for instance (economic disruption) - would that also be called violence?
Just so it's clear, there were environmental protests that _were_ cleared out for the same economic disruption reasons. There were concerns that it was not the right thing to do and too aggressive at the time, but I believe in retrospect that many consider it to have been the right course of action.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/what-you-need-to-know-about-th...
...This is also why JIT logistics is incredibly fragile. Our economic sects have been shirking the inherent risk of long tail disruptive events for the better part of my life.
There is a certain schadenfreude to seeing the come-uppances.
Let that happen for long and you'll quickly have thousands of workers who need to feed their families converging in the blockade to take matters into their own hands.
It's not just the immediate impact, either. Canadian manufacturers who sell to the U.S. (which is pretty much all of them) are constantly fighting against 'buy American' legislation that makes it more likely companies will shift production out of Ontario - and trade disruptions make it even harder to compete if Canada looks like a flaky trading partner that can't even keep its own border open. And manufacturing workers know what's at stake, and things would get ugly quickly.
So it's not just inconveniencing corporations - it's threatening the short and long term viability of tend of thousands of jobs and the people working those jobs aren't likely to take it laying down.
So blocking trade isn't off the table, but anyone who does it had better expect the government to treat it as a public order emergency because if they don't, it will very quickly become a public order emergency on its own.
Our charter right is peaceful assembly. If the protests were not peaceful, the police would be right to shut them down. The reason the Ottawa police cannot do anything for weeks is because they are peaceful.
>On the other hand, I’ve heard the protests have caused millions in trade to be shut down which I would not consider a peaceful act.
That would be an incorrect characterization. The bridge blockade did not touch the tunnel. https://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2022/02/12/Detroit-...
Furthermore, a blockade that isn't violent... isn't violence.
>If some non-citizen entity shut down millions in trade, I don’t think it would be viewed as peaceful.
Yes Trudeau has alleged that these blockades/occupations/sieges are in fact the US government. Even using the name occupation is a international definition. Military occupations would certainly justify the measures being taken by the Canadian governments.
I even agree, if the USA has a military occupation over Canada. Trudeau is right to do what he has done.
That's not what is happening. Trudeau is looking to squash peaceful political protests and the propaganda of calling the protesters racists and white supremacists is insane.
>Should the right to peaceful protest include the right to halt trade at this scale? Are the reports of halted trade overblown?
If the protests 'are at this scale' absolutely. Though yes, clearly the detroit tunnel was open. They even had 1 lane open for the bridge. It's completely overblown.
The correct action for the governments to do when protesters are blockading isn't to send in the guns and tear them down. It's to open conversation with the peaceful protesters. Liberal MP Joel Lightbound is a smart man. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-mp-politicization-p...
the protesters just need a roadmap to no restrictions and human rights being returned.
Trudeau has taken this action because there is no roadmap. He wishes to keep the totalitarian state.
This is incorrect, adenoviral vector vaccines (certainly, ones which induce cells to express cytotoxic spike proteins) are also quite new and relatively untested. My wife's period was messed up by her J&J shot and my friend's mother had to have surgery to remove a life-threatening blood clot from her leg. And if the idea is "just get the shot so you can move on with your life," well, the J&J shot only buys you two months of reprieve under most of the mandate & passport schemes.
Other than that, I greatly appreciate your comment.
B) throwing 1000’s of people out of work as collateral damage is pretty selfish. These people aren’t involved in what they’re protesting.
C) The original item of the protest was based on a us action. Can’t enter the us unvaccinated per their regs. Perhaps they protested the wrong people/places?
D) the national defence act enables the military to be involved if requested by the appropriate premier. This has not been invoked.
E) most of the mandates are imposed and controlled at the provincial level. Train, air and entry to Canada along with the federal workforce is under federal mandate.
First 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. https://newrepublic.com/article/165341/fox-news-vaccine-cana...
Evidence suggests that funding for this protest is in large part foreign (IE not from canada) and that most canadian donations are from wealthy business owners, not workers https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/14/22933772/givesendgo-fundi... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/world/canada/canada-truck...
The convoy is unpopular both in Ottawa and provincially, and is in fact not supported by a majority of Canadians
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22926134/canada-truc... https://www.cp24.com/news/almost-2-3rds-of-canadians-oppose-...
There are multiple _legal_, _judicial_ injunctions in place and the police are failing to enforce them. The rule of law is breaking down and that cannot be allowed to happen.
A better and valid comparison would be the Wet'suwet'en protests at Coastal GasLink, or the G20 protests from the 2000s.
My understanding was this was about the mandates and restrictions themselves not about the vaccine.
I mean I am vaxxed and oppose vax mandates.
why? could you explain your stande on other mandates/requirements and what's this vax mandate does that makes it so different? (eg. you need a passport/visa-like thing to enter, you need clothes, if you arrive by car that needs papers and a valid safety profile, you need to use the seatbelt, and so on)
Heck, if the right country wants you in jail for the right reasons, you could flee somewhere else and have the _Air Force_ used against you.
Maybe in some very extreme case they would, but it is better that someone escapes custody than someone (including the suspect dying).
Then again, just a cop drawing a weapon or firing a weapon usually makes the news.
They won't arrest you the next chance they get (say, when your plate shows up on a scanner)?
I'd propose that avoiding jail indefinitely will eventually lead to violence in any halfway-organized jurisdiction. And if you start shooting, eventually the government will shoot back.
All over a driving misdemeanor. We just assume that reasonable people won't let these things escalate that far, but yes: Every law written is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun.
Bottom line: If you are not a danger to anyone, they will let you escape rather than kill anyone (including you), even if it means you are never brought to justice.
It makes a lot of sense, if you don't have a revenge based justice system.
This is a nice article about immunization requirements in Canada a decade before Covid hit.
In 2011, only 3 provinces had mandates for students and also had plenty of exceptions.
And this is for vaccines with decades of use and highly effective at preventing transmission and disease.
So is enforcement of contracts between private parties. Are you against private property as well?
If we are, neither private contracts nor vaccine mandates are directly enforced at the barrel of a gun - the RCMP aren't busting down people's doors to shoot them for failing to get vaccinated, just as people aren't immediately killed by the feds for violating legal contracts.
If we're talking about how they're ultimately enforced, if all else fails...well, they're both enforced the same way.
For private disputes, it’s also not uncommon to have an armed officer help enforcement. Consider an extremely common private contract dispute - an eviction - where the police may come to remove the tenant.
The “barrel of a gun” is of course a metaphor, but first order enforcement can be closer than you think.
By and large, the government does not come take away your freedom for breach of private party contracts. There are some exceptions, where we wrote law (government mandate) elevating some types of private party contract.
But generally, no, me violating your NDA won't escalate to the government shooting me, no matter how uncooperative I am.
Ultimately, enforcing (almost) any law does come down to use of force if the guilty party is intransigent enough. Exceptions are when some thing can be "snatched" away and held truly inaccessible to the guilty party, such that they cannot possibly retrieve it.
Not sure what happens if you have a civil judgement entered against you and then quit having income. (Not reporting income is probably a real Crime, and they’d go after you for that)
1. debtor's prison isn't a thing anymore
2. look up "judgement-proof"
It depends on the mandate but the gun barrel is generally at the end of a long chain of escalating non-cooperation that starts with a sternly worded letter.
Some governments are more trigger-happy than others, but at least in gentler societies, to get to the point where you're looking at a gun barrel, you'd probably have to respond somewhere along that chain with significant violence yourself.
In societies where you are allowed to carry a gun, the government having an even bigger gun is rather implied by the word enforced, because a mandate couldn't be called enforced if the police could only hand sternly-worded letters to you while you ignore it and shot at them.
> in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly
If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
Instinctively though I do want to answer yes, I would support mandates more under higher risk scenarios. In an ideal world though I would probably prefer if communities could self select by risk tolerance i.e it's possible to live/work/party somewhere nearby with like minded people.
> If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
I don't know whether that would necessarily be the case. We have seen how easily people are manipulated via misinformation campaigns.
I'm also not against a small amount of natural selection. People choosing their own fates helps to keep everyone happy and some Darwinism is probably a good outcome for humanity in the long term.
Self selected communities are another good answer although I imagine it's hard to totally bubble communities up along the axis of vaccine-opinionation without any overlap.
It might depend on how selective the lethality is! If a small population is vulnerable then I don't have a problem with them protecting themself to the best of their own abilities (no mandates). This is fairly common already with the immunocompromised etc.
If a large portion of the population is vulnerable then it becomes more grey. I'm pretty uncomfortable with there being a large amount of preventable suffering but intellectually my brain wants to take a long term view. The best possible society in the future seems like one where humans have stronger immune systems and take fewer vaccinations, not more. Is this something we can evolve towards? Is my poor knowledge of biology leading me astray? Who knows!
Given I know nothing I'm happy to fall back onto the distributed decision making apparatus (individual choice).
For me, this hypothetical is more a situation where we're talking about one's freedom to make choices that endanger those around them, in addition themselves. When the principal danger is to oneself I think restrictions are rarely justified, but when the consequences are borne by others, I think it's more justified. For example, when operating cars, we don't allow you to drink and drive, run red lights, or drive on the sidewalk, primarily because it creates at least as much risk for your neighbours as it does for yourself.
I think this point makes broad sense but needs refinement. For example if we assume there is a vaccine available that:
- Reduces personal injury - Does not prevent transmission
Using the above logic would mean that after taking the vaccine restrictions are more justified because the burden of the disease has shifted. I don't think that's what you intended and probably means that there still needs to be reference to absolute harm and taking reasonable minimization measures.
In that sense, if a vaccine purely reduced transmission even without offering any other protection, mandating it could still be justified for certain activities, just like a driver's license is considered reasonable today.
I'm sure driver's licenses were considered very controversial restrictions on personal freedom back when they were first introduced.
Taken to the extreme this kind of thought becomes pretty anti-human (thanos, global warming)
> mandating it could still be justified for certain activities
Yeah it could be justified for sure - I just don't think there's any way of ignoring that it's a judgement call/balance.
Of course, we could allow that freedom and then just penalize people in court when they happen to injure others with their car. But it might be even more dangerous to set a precedent where you can take someone to court for transmitting a virus to you, or get charged with murder for being part of a transmission chain that results in a death.
Anyway, so I agree with you that it's about balance, and I do agree that Canada's policies are not getting that right (and, in many instances, lacking common sense).
Is it justifiable to impose a vaccine mandate, if brown-eyed or type-A/B/O people are not bothering to get vaccinated because they feel safe themselves?
(I'm really more interested in the philosophy and ethics than the facts of the actual situation. I agree that on the factual level in 2022, there's plenty of room to argue about the usefulness or counterproductivity of these mandates. I want to know if vaccine manades are ever justified).
... people don't work like that. :/
The current evidence indicates that the vaccine reduces the spread of the virus by about 50% [1]. It's a preprint, so take it with a grain of salt, but it does seem to match our prior 50% estimate for delta. [2]
That is a significant reduction, especially when we are talking about truckers who are inherently high risk as they tend to visit a lot of small towns.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
The various vaccine mandate restrictions really aren't about protecting the young and healthy. We'll be fine. It's about limiting the most dangerous, transmission risk areas (eg. bars) to people who are best able to handle the disease (ie. are vaccinated) as others are more likely to die of the disease and more likely to catch it in these places.
Because whenever the government does something, or is given the ability to do something, whether de jure, or de facto, I ask myself "Would I feel comfortable with my worst political enemy having the power to do this?"
EDIT: The answer I was responding to edited his answer before I finished posting, so the original question was just. "Why do you opposse vax mandates?" My answer still stands.
Your appraisal is an example of the slippery slope fallacy. The only slippery slope is encouraging people to evaluate policies by who is proposing them rather than whether the policy is beneficial. Then the person who is proposing policy can get away with policies that are more and more in their interest and less in mine. As long as the standard of evaluating policy by whether it is beneficial is upheld, there is no slippery slope.
Why would that be any different than your preferred political party/politician telling you to get vaccinated?
Just because you don't agree with someone on some (many?) topics, doesn't mean you can't ever agree with them.
We're talking about well established scientifically backed public health advice. It doesn't matter who most recently repeated the advice, it's the advice itself that's important.
For example the creation of the no fly list, red flag laws, drug laws, civil asset forfeiture, hate crime laws, etc.
Laws have a tendency to get divorced from the situation that created them over the many years but seldom are repealed when their original cause is gone.
As such it is often very likely that my political enemy or your political enemy will have the power of those laws.
This just like development one must always think of the edge cases and error path not just the happy path.
Because you've indicated you oppose this vaccine mandate.
We're discussing a specific use of an already existing piece of legislation (Emergencies Act). There's no additional power granted here, the act was pre-existing, it's being applied.
You certainly may take issue with the fact the Emergencies Act could be used for nefarious purposes i.e. that the scope is too large. That's likely a valid concern. Sadly, most laws and legislations are open to interpretation and susceptible to abuse.
However, if this mandate were to be rolled back, the Emergencies Act isn't going anywhere. The Emergencies Acts is still sitting there available to future leaders.
Let's suppose you think a Covid vaccine mandate is a good thing, but you're ideologically opposed to it coming into force via an act that could be abused. Firstly, you're most certainly not on the same page as the majority of people opposing this mandate.
Secondly, what's your plan? Get rid of the Emergencies Act and come up with new legislation for a vaccine mandate, in record time, and with no holes in it, all the while people are unnecessarily dying, hospitals are unnecessarily overloaded and there's unnecessary economic damage... for ideological reasons?
Mass vaccination is the only way to stop transmission, of course, you just can’t have some people vaccinated and others not, vaccines don’t work like that. The exemptions have never been very deep (very few takers each year), but if they exceed something like 5%, then an adjustment must be made. Washington state for example, revoked personal and philosophical exemptions for MMR vaccines after an outbreak. Religious exemptions are still allowed, but those have a much higher bar than a philosophical exemption. Medical exemptions are always allowed, they are one major reason why most everyone else needs to get vaccinated in the first place (because people who can’t get the vaccine are at risk from transmission).
I guess one could argue that everyone that wants to should get vaccinated to better protect those who don’t want to be vaccinated. That makes sense, but hardly seems fair.
Very, very different, and unprecedented for the general public.
How do you think we eradicated Smallpox?
Yes we did:
> In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution.
> One of those holdouts, a Swedish-born pastor named Henning Jacobson, took his anti-vaccine crusade all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation's top justices issued a landmark 1905 ruling that legitimized the authority of states to “reasonably” infringe upon personal freedoms during a public health crisis by issuing a fine to those who refused vaccination.
It's ridiculous to even compare the two.
The point is even with smallpox some people refused to get the vaccine. People are weird.
...of five dollars back then, which would be ~$160 today.
The difference between a $160 fine and being fired from your job is enormous, but you just ignored that part to make your argument.
By quarantine and contact tracing, after vaccination failed.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/end-smallpox
> Contrary to popular belief smallpox was not eradicated by mass vaccination. Though tried initially it proved difficult to implement in many countries and was abandoned in favour of surveillance-containment. This involved trained workers searching for cases, with rewards for those who found them. Cases and their contacts were then isolated; contacts were vaccinated. Interestingly this strategy incorporated elements of a system devised in 1778 by John Haygarth in Chester. The last natural case occurred in Somalia in 1977 and after exhaustive enquiries the 1980 WHO Assembly concluded that smallpox had been eradicated.
1902 letter about the Leicester, UK method that was later adopted elsewhere, https://ia601300.us.archive.org/28/items/b24765430/b24765430...
> I am far from saying that vaccination is a delusion, but the experience of Leicester during the past thirty years has been unique, and shows that compulsory vaccination is not essential for the effectual control of smallpox, for despite the neglect of vaccination, the authorities here have been successful in stamping out numerous outbreaks of smallpox, the deaths from the disease have been very few, and the expense involved, when compared with that in other well-vaccinated towns, has been trifling. Under these circumstances I have ventured to publish the following paper, read at the Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health, held at Exeter, in August, which explains in detail what is known as the “Leicester system of dealing with smallpox.”
Canada is kind of in a difficult place, because refusing medical treatment is an even bigger taboo then forcing vaccination. But the publicly funded medical system is having to pay a high price both in cost and in capacity due to that remaining 20%.
This is why people are looking for ways to reduce that. Refusing medical care is not currently seen as a viable option, thus vaccine incentives are being explored, like restricting what someone can do if unvaccinated.
And, relevant for this discussion, also trucking across borders.
In Ontario, today, over half the ICU cases are vaccinated.
In Ontario, today, almost 75% of the hospital cases are vaccinated.
In Ontario, today, 70% of reported cases are among the vaccinated.
The idea that the unvaccinated are somehow driving, causing, or are to blame for the pandemic is completely wrong. For most of January, in Ontario, the rate of infection was higher among the vaccinated than among he unvaccinated!
The case for vaccine mandates or vaccine passes make absolutely no sense when you look at the actual data, actual reality. Even if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone today, you would only reduce the strain on the healthcare system a tiny amount. And yet people support governments forcing people to get vaccinated?
> The case for vaccine mandates or vaccine passes make absolutely no sense when you look at the actual data, actual reality.
Except it does.
I really don't understand how you can say the rate of infection is higher in vaccinated using this data? It points to the complete opposite, with the smallest percentage of population 15% accounting 2x to 3x more in hospitalization and ICU.
And the data gets worse if you look only at adults.
I'm not saying unvaccinated are causing the pandemic, but they are currently the reason for the continued restrictions. It's because we fear that without restrictions they'd create a sudden surge in cases needing hospitalization and ICUs which the healthcare system might not be able to handle.
That's what people mean when they say that the unvaccinated are preventing us to lift restrictions and to make the pandemic endemic.
Asking to both be unvaccinated, and for all restrictions to be removed, but also asking to be promptly and freely treated if you catch COVID and need to be hospitalized or put in an ICU is a nice thing to demand, but it's not realistically feasible. Based on the data, it is likely to create a surge to the healthcare system that it couldn't handle.
It isn't right now, but it was in Ontario up until January 27th. Scroll down to the section "COVID-19 cases by vaccination status", and look at the graph.
Note: This data is true but misleading! Antivaxxers are claiming that this is evidence that the vaccines make you more susceptible to infection, but that is probably not true, because all of this data is missing information about previous infection. The unvaccinated cohort is more likely to have natural immunity than the vaccinated one, which skews the data.
> It points to the complete opposite, with the smallest percentage of population 15% accounting 2x to 3x more in hospitalization and ICU.
You started the paragraph talking about infections, and then switched to talking about hospitalizations. The rate of hospitalization and ICU patients is higher among the unvaccinated, yes. And at the same time, the rate of cases was higher among the vaccinated, in January, in Ontario.
> It's because we fear that without restrictions they'd create a sudden surge in cases needing hospitalization and ICUs which the healthcare system might not be able to handle.
Yes, but that fear was completely unfounded, as evidenced by the peak numbers. Canada passed the Omicron peak in cases over a month ago.
And again, you're blaming a minority of infected, a minority of hospital and ICU patients. The majority of patients are vaccinated, and yet you assign zero blame to them.
> Based on the data, it is likely to create a surge to the healthcare system that it couldn't handle.
Denmark lifted all restrictions two weeks ago, despite having the highest number of cases/capita in all of Europe. They already had much less restrictions in place then, than Canada has now. Denmark is fine. Canada will be fine. The Omicron wave has followed the same pattern in every US state, despite wildly different amounts of restrictions. No-one was overwhelmed, and now the wave is over.
There might be future waves, in the fall, because the virus is highly seasonal, and they will be even milder, because there will be even more immunity among the population by then. It'll be fine. We'll be fine.
This kind of lunacy, where nothing has meaning, since everything is "just like everything else" has got to stop. There's a big difference between the accepted norm of wearing clothing and being forced to inject your body with drugs. Expecting people to explain it to you is a bad faith attempt to let them say enough words so that you can argue semantics endlessly with them.
Or if they are necessary, show me the data that supports it.
Reaching for a mandate 'just because', is poor government.
This is exactly what happened with the TSA. If people don’t stand up against mandates, like people failed to do after the War on Terror, we’ll still be wearing masks at airports and proving our vaccine status decades from now.
COVID vaccines, however, are not effective at preventing the transmission of COVID, this is well established science at this point. So, that said, why the mandate?
At the moment hospitals are overwhelmed and so at this point the vaccine mandates are about keeping hospital admissions from exploding.
My biggest concern with this all is the timing. The vaccine rules have been around for months, but right at the same time as Russia is preparing an invasion of a Canadian ally, we have unknown foreign money pouring into the country supporting an ill-defined movement with the sole goal of disrupting the country.
The mandate says that non-Canadian truckers need to be vaccinated to enter the country.
The mandate says that Canadian truckers, if they are not vaccinated, are not going to be exempt from the normal border entry measures, which is that they'd need to quarantine on entry unless they are vaccinated.
The US has a similar mandate for Canadian truckers, they're not allowed to enter the US without being vaccinated.
It's a little strange, because it effectively means that a trucker, either US or Canadian, who want to cross the boarder and then come back needs to be vaccinated because the other country forces them to do so.
Each respective country doesn't force their own citizens Trucker to be vaccinated, but Canada does force them to quarantine on entry if not. That said, this doesn't really matter because to enter the other country they'll have to be vaccinated anyways.
> I mean I am vaxxed and oppose vax mandates.
How do you feel about paying for healthcare of people who are not vaccinated and need care to treat COVID?
Obviously an unvaccinated trucker from Canada cannot enter the US and return until both the Canadian and US restrictions are lifted. It doesn’t matter in which order they are lifted, but both need to be. Since they are Canadian citizens obviously they are protesting the Canadian component of the travel restriction.
On a side note: How does it make sense that an unvaccinated trucker in Canada can legally deliver goods in Canada, and an unvaccinated trucker in the US can legally deliver goods in the USA, but they cannot deliver goods between the US and Canada. What is the science behind this exactly?
But requiring foreign visitors to have certain vaccines is much less politically fraught. If you don't like it, tough, you don't get to enter said country.
Asking what is the science behind these decisions is being disingenuous and you know that. Please stop.
As to scientific or not science, the science is in. Vaccines reduce the spread and severity of COVID and governments generally attempt to mitigate the risk of dangerous things happening to their people needlessly. Why are mandates constantly changing? Look to the knowledge available to the decision makers when they set policy. Most governments try to thread the needle between positive economic and health outcomes, but to be sure, nobody know the right answer. All decisions have consequences.
The same way I feel for them paying for my care the day I drove drunk and crashed, or when despite vaccines, I still got Covid Delta.
Because I was obese, vaccines didn't help much. I had a lot more problems, and for several months longer than I would have had, had I : lost 35 Kg/75 lbs, lowered my blood sugar level (no diabetes but consistently high), eaten less meat, and had a regular life rythm to lower my blood pressure, as my family doctor implored me to do last three and a half years.
Now I learned my lesson in really being responsible first of myself, and then acting according to principles of solidarity (as you imply the unvaccinated don't do).
I now walk 10+ km a day, see a nutritionist and go to the gym three times a week. I also pay attention to my vitamin intake, and take blood samples every three months.
I'm not anti-vaxxer nor oppose vax mandates; but your question misses the point. I am happy to pay for healthcare of people who are not vaccinated the same way I'm happy to pay for healthcare of smokers with lung cancer. I would still do my best to educate them, though. Negligence or ignorance of others should not affect our social duties.
I don't know and I don't care as I said in my previous comment. When does not quitting smoking become negligence?
Negligence is bad, but they don't deserve to die if they can't afford health care.
When it comes to smokers for example, people have realized that adding a tax to cigarettes and other tabaco products could make it practical that people get subsidized treatment of smoking induced medical issues.
So the increase in medical cost and strain to the system is offset by a tax. On top of that, there are also restrictions of where you can smoke/drink, how you can advertise for it, etc., making the prospect of doing so less enticing. And the tax act as a disincentive as well.
This also applies to alcohol.
In other cases, substances have been outright banned, and I don't mean just narcotics, but also things like chemicals in foods, products, construction materials, etc.
Some people argue the same in order to tax sugar and fast food (and I can't remember if there are any such tax in Canada yet or not, but some cities in the US have it).
Similarly here, the institutions are faced with a real practical challenge. The cost and strain to the Canadian healthcare system of COVID as a whole is huge, and of that cost and strain, the majority is now from unvaccinated.
You can ideologically agree they all should be covered, but it's now hurting other medical care, and the cost is just getting larger and larger.
That's where, similar to tobacco and alcohol taxes, options for COVID are being explored.
That's why people have been talking about a tax for the unvaccinated. And maybe that's a better way then mandates, but in any case, I don't think it is useful to just dismiss the practical cost/strain of the unvaccinated right now, because that's what is motivating the legislature and other civil servant to pursue mandates.
So the topic needs to be addressed, if you want to convince people mandates aren't the way to go, you need to address their concern with why they want mandates in the first place, and that's the strain/cost to the healthcare system primarily.
All I'm saying is that we can't just say "well, then don't ask me to pay for your medical bills" to a human being just because they are being ignorant, negligent, or plain assholes, whether or not they pay a tax to compensate their choices.
FYI opposing the state forcing you to be vaccinated is included in the definition of “anti-vaxxer”[0].
Do you really want to go down that path? We provide healthcare to all sorts of people that choose to do things that impact their health (drunk drivers, drug addicts, etc). Hypothetically, what happens if there are long term health effects from the vaccinations? Should the unvaccinated say, "why should we pay for your heart treatments"?
I’m a vaccinated boosted physician and will continue to get boosted every 6 months. Mandates/coercion for medical treatment violate patient autonomy and medical ethics.
I am ok with those who aren’t vaccinated getting medical treatment. Same with flu, mmr, DTP, and other vaccines.
I’m ok with alcoholics, addicts, smokers, and the obese getting treatment. I’m ok with women getting pap smears and cervical cancer screening even if they don’t have gardisil. I’m ok with type 2 diabetics receiving insulin even if they did absolutely nothing to lower their A1C. What else is there? STD treatment? Coronary artery disease? Almost everything.
Many people have health problems that are directly related to their own personal decisions. And yes, they should get treatment.
Why has the world lost its fucking mind.
I agree in ideal, but the next question to make that a reality is how? You'll have to find ways to scale the system and pay for it all. And that's where you can experiment with taxes, levies, preventative mandates, regulations and such.
This is how we managed to scale and offer those for smokers and all other prior.
Regardless, I think he's been treated poorly by the company as we explicitly denied him the ability to join us at a few on-site meetings and outings. I'm not sure anyone can credibly assert anymore that his un-vaccinated status puts anyone other than himself at increased risk. At this point, it's a form of psychological warfare against him for refusing to conform, and that's WRONG.
I don't know if I would have gotten a vaccination without the threat of termination. I probably would have, but being forced has left me feeling anger towards both my employer and the gov't. And I've been with my employer for 8 years or so - I've enjoyed my time there.
But I live in the sticks. Social pressure is much lower here compared to the city.
In the city. Yeah. The city is rough. All those people crammed together. It changes reality.
- Plenty of vaccinated people against vaccine mandates and other restrictions. Doctors are allowed to be Covid positive and treat patients in BC and QC. But apparently truckers who are Covid negative are a problem?
- Foreign money influence is a problem, sure, but businesses? They can’t support a protest?
- Last poll I saw (Ipsos) said 1 out of 3 Canadians support the protest. 1 out of 3. That’s HUGE.
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine...
[$] the survey option was "go home now, they have made their point"
"Survey Methodology: The Angus Reid Institute conducted an online survey from Feb. 11-13, 2022 among a representative randomized sample of 1,622 Canadian adults *WHO ARE MEMBERS OF ANGUS REID FORUM.*" (emphasis mine)
And they wonder why large swathes of the public find it difficult to trust them.
Obviously, there isn't good polling data for support for the revolution, but the information I can find puts estimates at 40-45%, with support for the Crown at between 15-20%. I wouldn't put too much weight on even that, though.
The popular 1/3 each for, against, and indifferent to the Revolution seems to be based on misinterpreting an 1815 letter from John Adams to James Lloyd recounting his estimate of support in America for France and the French Revolution in the US ca. 1797 (with the strong anti- side being supporters of England and opponents of the Revolution, and the neutrals being indifferent between England and France that would attach to one or the other side based on transient circumstances.)
That's because hospitals were slammed. And because viral debris shows up as positive on PCR tests long after people are no longer contagious and that has been well-known since mid-2020. A doctor who is no longer symptomatic but is positive on a PCR is better than no doctor for the patient.
That grossly misrepresented poll asked only if respondents sympathize with their cause. If you agree that mandates need to go. Note that when asked directly, 60-70% of Canada are over mandates, and just being asked to show sympathy already lost 50% of those people.
But this doesn't mean that those people support this protest. Indeed, in subsequent polls, over 60% of the country wants the protesters jailed.
And sympathy is a kind of support. I mean, you can have support without sympathy for the cause they are protesting?
22% said they should stay, so 1 out of 5 directly support it.
Canadians are very against this protest. If they simply parked some trucks and hung some signs, whatever. Once they were blasting horns 24/7, and then when that didn't work (given that the overwhelming majority of "truckers" are not with their cause and continued working) blocking international borders, the Canadian public turned dramatically against this petulant outrage. Having a bunch of Americans cheering it on, financing it, and even trying to join in has made it a cause that most Canadians find outright treasonous now.
Plenty of people are sympathetic if a starving man breaks into a store to steal some food. That isn't the same thing as being supportive of breaking and entering or theft.
Like I said, millions of Canadians.
I hope that the convoys are not only completely cut off from economic support, but also that the people driving those trucks are identified and prevented from ever crossing the border into the US. Truck driving is a decent job. Be a shame if some of them were forced to earn a living doing something else from now on.
This is a terrible understanding of Canada's system and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (including the ones that Trudeau just suspended with the Emergencies Act).
It's not hard to understand how authoritarian systems come about - it's people like you who gladly support them as long as the enemy is someone you agree is bad.
Yikes.
Your sources indicate that the majority of the funding is from Canada. The second largest source is from the US (which doesn't seem out of place, given that cross-border trucking restrictions affect both American and Canadian truckers):
> A review of the data shows that some $4.3 million came from Canada, while another $3.6 million originated in the United States, though the United States accounted for the most individual donations. Small donations from dozens of other countries made up a fraction of the total amount raised.
> and that most canadian donations are from wealthy business owners, not workers
This is true for most causes. Workers don't have much money to donate, and rely on wealthier people sympathetic to their cause.
> Your sources indicate that the majority of the funding is from Canada.
Note that these two statements don't contradict, and yours is incorrect. There were more individual donors from the US contributing a smaller overall amount (56% of donors giving $3.62 million) compared to Canada (29% of donors, giving $4.31 million)[1]. And the total amount raised was 8.7 million[2]. Summary: A large part of the funding is indeed American. The ever-so-slight majority of the funding is non-Canadian. A majority of the donors were American.
[1] https://twitter.com/AmarAmarasingam/status/14930948285314621...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wpax/freedom-convoy-givese...
Where is your evidence of that?
> Leaked data said to be from the GiveSendGo crowdfunding platform, posted last night to a now-defunct web page by anonymous hackers, lists records of more than 92,000 donations totaling more than $8 million. A review of the data shows that some $4.3 million came from Canada, while another $3.6 million originated in the United States, though the United States accounted for the most individual donations. Small donations from dozens of other countries made up a fraction of the total amount raised.
Do you also think Governor Whitmer was meddling in "foreign" affairs when she spoke up?
Please don't try to conflate vaccination policy to the level of human rights.
What you just said is:
> Please don't try to conflate medical human rights to the level of human rights.
The fact you can't clearly see that is staggering. People have a right to decide whether or not they want a medical procedure. This is absolutely no different than forced sterilization during the eugenics movement. A group of people in power, absolutely sure of their correctness, are trying to force medical procedures on people.
I can't believe we haven't learned this lesson yet.
Yes, you need to listen to your minorities but this is the tail wagging the dog.
[1] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-majority...
I'm not sure why people think getting vaccinated is evidence of support for mandatory vaccinations.
Taxes are mandatory too, I pay them not because I think they're at the right level and used for the right things, but because of the practical repercussions of what would happen if I didn't and I got found out.
(it shouldn't matter, but - I'm double vaccinated, mainly because the jurisdiction I live in requires it for air travel. I have no strong feelings about vaccines either way).
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis
> police officials sometimes abused their powers without just cause, and some prominent artists and intellectuals associated with the sovereignty movement were detained.
And to all the comments saying Canadians are supporting this move, they also supported it back in 1970. It's when they saw the consequences and that they actually understood how wrong it was that popular support dropped.
More information on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act
Furthermore, have you read the link you sent? The entire "Provisions" explains while this is way out of line to deal with protesters in Ottawa.
Using it for "Public Order" as Trudeau is doing, was meant to be a tool against:
"The Act references the definition provided in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, which includes espionage, sabotage, detrimental foreign influences, activities which support the threat or use of violence for a political, religious or ideological objective; or those activities which threaten to undermine or otherwise destroy, or overthrow the Government of Canada."
You'll never guess who was actually planting the bombs at that time. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
>The data presented herein are derived from survey data produced using Vox Pop Labs' online public affairs panel
So, it's useless... their primary method of polling is journalists interviewing people that they select? The people that do not support mandates generally do not support journalists, making this survey utterly useless and biased from the start.
If you look at a reputable pollster, and not a couple of ideologues sitting in a room, you'll find large swathes of populations that are very skeptical of mandates, even in very liberal Europe. [2] In Germany, a whopping 62% are against it. While in France, it's 75% against.
[1] https://covid19monitor.org/
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/02/03/as-pandemic-co...
France is well known as a vaccine hesitant country for what it's worth.
That's irrelevant. The protest is not against vaccines.
I'm fully vaccinated and have voluntarily received my booster shot, and I would support the convoy if I was Canadian. I also support vaccination and want the highest amount of people to be vaccinated. There's no contradiction there. I want people to get vaccinated, I just don't want people to be forced to get vaccinated.
> Evidence suggests that funding for this protest is in large part foreign
The news has spread to the world and it's currently the most notable example of government vs. anti-mandate disputes.
> most canadian donations are from wealthy business owners,
Most donations, in general, are almost always from wealthy people, for the very obvious reason that they have more money to donate.
The channel owner is a Canadian lawyer named Viva Frei. Frei's personal attitude toward the protests is broadly supportive, but the valuable thing about his coverage is that he speaks to anybody who is willing to talk to him as he wanders around the streets of Ottawa, including counter-protestors.
A livestream can never be a true replacement for being there in person, but this is the best that I've found. Coverage from other livestream channels is also easily available on YouTube.
It's very easy for lack of understanding to lead to distrust, fear, and hate. You can (and very well might) disagree with people after having heard them out, but you will almost certainly view them as more human, and is that not the central feature the empathetic mindset is supposed to be about?
If you have the time, I recommend making an effort to watch extended and unedited interviews with the people behind any protest movement you intend to form a strong opinion about (not just this one).
Remember that the literal definition of "prejudice" is something close to a "decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments necessary to a just and impartial decision." [1] If you don't wish to be prejudiced, don't let yourself form a strong opinion without first having learned what people you think you disagree with have to say for themselves.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/prejudice#etymonline_v_19410
Others have addressed the fact that more than half the funds are from Canada.
Imagine if someone tried to discredit BLM by saying that most of the funding came from wealthy business and not individual black community members...
> the majority of donors come from the U.S. (56%) and Canada (29%)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/world/canada/canada-truck...
Phrasing it as the majority of the donors are foreign to drive a narrative that Canadians don't care about this issue when they are putting their money and their time on the line is absurd.
This is incorrect, 4.3 million was from Canada out of 8.7 million total. ~49.5%
I do understand that the truckers were disturbing the peace of ordinary people - I think this should be discouraged. However there must be a way to peacefully assemble without the government's approval.
I don't see how we can have meaningful civil discourse if you need permission to protest at all.
By protesting only against things that Trudeau himself supports protests against, obviously /s.
Unfortunately, it is only a halfway sarcasm, because it legitimately sounds like this is how it might go down.
That hasn't happened. Grossly exaggerated statements are not what I and my friends who have been at the Ottawa protest for 3 weeks have seen.
We aren't living in 1950s. Everyone has a phone camera now a days and Ottawa, the capital, has security cameras everywhere and yet none of this ever gets captured on camera and nobody seems to capture the face of the people supposedly doing such things.
Violence does occur in cities, and it will continue to. I've seen no evidence protestors or attendees are violent or even aggressive, and livestreamers passing police and asking them impromptu specifically this confirms it.
There's bouncy castles for kids to play on, multi-ethnic groups dancing together and holding native ceremonies or prayer, people giving out free food, public handing dollars directly to truckers because of the frozen funds - every weekend it's packed with families, smiles and good vibes. And then the "news" comes on and says it's an "insurrection" (yeah, don't they just always have bouncy castles) and Trudeau says they're all racist transphobes.
It's laughable.
If more violence/crime is occurring, a more likely explanation may be the friendly and busy atmosphere his driven drunks/addicts/homeless out of the city centre, and these people are now committing crimes they would ordinarily commit in the city centre in surrounding areas instead.
That would suck for those affected, but all of this could be over in hours if Trudeau would simply remove the mandates and the passport. (Which are the Ottawa's protest organisers only demands, as they've reiterated multiple times.)
The mandates clearly don't work for their intended purpose of coercing people, and instead just motivate people to fight back yet stronger, in this case harming the economy and causing inconvenience to some. That's squarely on Trudeau's governance, nowhere else.
The passport is a completely silly idea given the facts regarding transmission, as many other countries have realised and since dropped.
It's a no brainer on Trudeau's part to simply drop both things. But instead he's chosen to humiliate himself spreading nonsense lies about the truckers and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Canadians who support them.
If the disruption is causing you grief, maybe write to him or your local Liberal representative and suggest he/they drop those things? They're demonstrably no good anyway, so it'd be a pretty simple win-win for everybody.
All the people who are cheering this emergency powers move, have not made clear to me why this particular protest has surpassed that point outside of noise issues in private (and non-public) areas (which I do understand are difficult).
Nobody said they can't protest. Nobody invoked the Emergencies Act when they initially blocked the roads. When they remained blocked for a week, still nobody invoked the Emergencies Act.
Minimal protest? Sure, absolutely that should be allowed. Nobody's making it not allowed. But "minimal" isn't where these protest are, and they haven't been for a while.
> The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing.
Why bring up Tiananmen Square when this is Canada? We have plenty of comparable protests.
If the protests were in-person, not causing major, disproportionate interference with the Canadian economy and all injunctions were being both obeyed and enforced, there would be no need for this act.
The rule of law is breaking down and this is required to ensure that the fabric of Canadian society does not deteriorate.
1. This was not a lone actor, you can see two men in the footage! 2. This is not clearly-unassociated, this happened as a result of an interaction between residents in the building and protesters! 3. Stop downplaying attempted mass murder you ass, the two men clearly attempted to burn the entire building and kill all of its inhabitants. You can see in the footage that they attempted to tie the exit shut so that residents couldn't escape. Shame on you for defending this.
It's a completely abhorrent and utterly stupid and harmful action whether or not it was motivated to intentionally physically kill anyone or not.
As for whether it's one or two people, I make no apology for paying less attention when watching something from legacy media sources who I've witnessed continually falsifying stories on this subject.
I honestly thought I saw one man twice but if it's two it's two, and I update my statement to "lone actors". I'm not going to watch that crap again so I'll just have to take your word for it.
And yes, I did see someone attempt to tie a door shut with what looked like an old t-shirt, it seemed to me much more like someone trying to create the appearance of an attempt at mass murder (and always in the direct line of sight of a camera).
Regardless, the motivations of this person or persons, whether your interpretation or mine, either way does not at all fit the profile of the truckers as I and many others have experienced it.
Anyone who spends any time watching their official announcements, or independent unedited livestreams of what's happening there, can instantly see that setting fire to apartment buildings is not remotely something they'd want to do, nor would it at all serve any of their stated goals and instead only work to utterly dismantle them.
They have bouncy castles for kids to play on. They hold multi-ethnic prayer sessions. They're voluntarily cleaning the streets of snow and ice, laying flowers on monuments, and having hockey games police. In Coutts yesterday the police hugged and shook hands with the protestors (and their kids) and they all sang the national anthem together. Look it up, some of us watched it happen live.
Hence my interpretation that whoever did this crap at the apartment building evidently aren't the same people.
Their most recent announcement was that they have moved some of their trucks closer to the city centre in order to cause less disturbance to residential areas. That's hardly characteristic of murderous terrorists.
They also stopped honking, initially between the hours of 8pm and 8am, and since mostly altogether, and if you bother to watch any of their official announcements they are clearly reasonable and intelligent people - the "story" presented by your "news" source simply doesn't fit. (And the pathetic attempt to portray that story by filming two random people disagreeing on a city street really didn't make the case.)
The truckers stated goals are that they want the (useless, and clearly not-working) vaccine mandates dropped so they can return to work, not to overthrow the government or even cause any further disruption. They've been explicit about this many times. Specifically they've said they want to go home, and when the mandates are dropped they immediately will. But backed into a corner as they feel they are, they're not moving until that happens.
Half of Europe and UK has already dropped the mandates, so it's not at all an unreasonable request given the present situation.
You come across as never having actually investigated or even heard anything they've put out as an official statement. Probably this is because they justifiably refuse to speak to the legacy media that continually mis-portrays them.
But if you search (easier to locate on bitchute or rumble), you'll find their press conferences and quickly realise the characterisation by the legacy media and trudeau, as many here have pointed out, is entirely incorrect.
This virus will continue to cycle through our world and continue to kill millions of people. Checked or no, this will continue until the virus dies or the vast majority are dead/immune. Nobody wants this; it's literally bad for everyone.
The gov has pumped billions to prop up the economy. Did you get your bail-out? I certainly didn't get 1 cent. I did my job without a belly ache; I've taken the inflation hit like everyone else. The least that I want to hear is selfish blow-hards complaining about governments putting a cap on their selfishness. We all hurt, and only working together will we heal.
In my opinion, Parliament is almost always a valid place to protest - outside a politician's or ordinary person's private home, much less so.
By invoking these emergency powers, I think it's hard to dispute that the Prime Minister's Office is stopping a peaceful protest!
This is the action of people who are not being heard. Trudeau could have de-escalated by meeting with the protesters, but he instead essentially said they should shut up and go back to driving.
These are not protests against the government. They harm actual people on the ground trying to get on with their lives.
I'm sorry the YouTube streams have not shown any of this. Who'd have thought that even youtubers can have editorial intent!
If it's a matter of being heckled or laughed at, surely one has to be able to deal with that and not scream bloody murder.
(We haven't had mask mandates here in Sweden, so your situation with masks seems peculiar and a bit weird from here)
Moreover, the mask mandates are provincial, not federal. If people are opposed to that, they should go heckle at Doug Ford, the Ontario Premier in Toronto, not at Trudeau in Ottawa. The fact is that the protestors don't have a common coherent narrative.
No one is gonna bat an eye if you block and intersection or a bridge for a day (ok maybe if it's the ambassador bridge).
But eventually, if you start occupying the space for days and weeks on end, there are limits to people's patience.
When a protest becomes an occupation, there are impacts on those whose neighbourhood is being occupied. Downtown Ottawa residents ain't happy.
Homeless shelters were raided by protestors, businesses have been forced to close due to threats, and people are afraid to leave their homes.
> Homeless shelters were raided by protestors, businesses have been forced to close due to threats, and people are afraid to leave their homes.
This is hilariously inaccurate. Everyone's bringing food TO the truckers and there's so much food there that truckers are refusing to take more.
Amazingly, we live in 2022 where everyone has a phone camera and Ottawa, the capital, has security cameras everywhere and yet none of this ever gets captured on camera and nobody seems to capture the face of the people supposedly doing such things.
Here's one actual violence which did get captured on video:
https://twitter.com/TheMarieOakes/status/1493053006237122562
And there's another video of someone with a mask on who drove his jeep over 3 protestors in Manitoba.
There are plenty of livestreams on YouTube (Viva Frei channel for example) which have been capturing everything.
Honking might be the only thing which could constitute as annoying but that hasn't happened for over a week.
Here's reporting by a government employee who lives right above the protest:
https://maybury.ca/the-reformed-physicist/2022/02/03/a-night...
I'm happy you're having fun.
> Costing millions
> Putting people out of work
> Shutting down civic functions
> intimidating school children
I don't know anything about Canadian government's response to the virus, but would it be fair to characterize the effects of the response as any or all of the above? Or if not affecting you directly, then those you may personally know or simply your fellow countrymen?
People do feel irritation when we have done so much collectively, only for a small minority to pee in the pool.
It's a war against the health system. It's on the verge of collapsing in many provinces because of Covid, and folks like Maxime Bernier want it privatized. Ideological and manipulative greed.
This is extremely disingenuous and ill-informed. I would recommend people do a google search for "Ontario hospital overcrowd" and set the date filter to be before 2020 (before COVID). You will find articles for every single year in past decade where hospitals were overcrowded because of flu.
Ontario ranks the 3rd last in the world in terms of hospital beds per 1000 (only mexico and chile are behind us) and absolute last within Canada. We used to have almost double the hospital beds per 1000 back in 1990s but since then our population has exploded and also gotten older but we haven't done much to increase the beds until last year when we added a few beds but still nowhere near to what it is supposed to be and what it used to be in 1990s.
A well functioning health care system is required to operate at 85% maximum but Ontario has been running at over 100% in most hospitals majority of the time BEFORE covid.
Ontario has the fewest hospital beds per capita in the country at 1.4 per 1,000 people. That compares to the national average of 2.0.
In 1990, Ontario had around 50000 hospital beds. Now, we only have around 34000 despite our population exploding and also getting older.
Many hospitals in Ontario operated at above 100% capacity in 2019. According to the Ontario Hospital Association, Ontario’s hospitals have faced low or nearly flat funding for years — with only an increase of 5.4% from 2012-19, compared to an average of 12.9% among other provinces while population increased and hospitals absorbed inflationary costs. Ontario’s Ministry of Health’s own numbers show the province has the lowest per capita health spending in Canada. The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario notes this also held true in 2018, and that the province had the lowest registered nurses per capita and the second-lowest hospital spending per capita rate in the country, after Quebec.
CBC News in January 2020 (before COVID) found 32 of Ontario’s hospitals were filled beyond 100% occupancy nearly every day in the first half of 2019 — including Ontario’s 10 biggest hospitals.
A study of 169 of Ontario’s acute care hospital sites during the same period found:
- 83 hospitals were beyond 100% capacity for more than 30 days.
- 39 hospitals hit 120% capacity or higher for at least one day.
- 40 hospitals averaged 100% capacity or higher.
https://pressprogress.ca/ontario-announces-surge-funding-to-...
Our health care systems in Canada have been collapsing every single year BEFORE covid:
> Before COVID, January 22, 2020: Brampton council declares health-care emergency amid hospital overcrowding, wait times
https://globalnews.ca/news/6447872/brampton-health-care-emer...
1 month prior to COVID:
> Some of Ontario's biggest hospitals are filled beyond capacity nearly every day, new data reveals
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hospital-hall...
> Dozens of hospitals across Ontario filling beyond capacity most days, CBC investigation finds
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-ontario-hal...
> Hallway medicine 'new norm' at Guelph General Hospital, CEO says. Numbers show capacity problems in vast majority of first half of 2019
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/hallway-me...
> 2016: Ontario’s major hospitals operating over capacity, documents reveal
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontarios-major...
> 2019: Sask. Association of Nurses says patient died due to overcrowding in emergency room
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saskatoon-patient-o...
> Canada ranks near the bottom of OECD countries when it comes to hospital beds per capita. For context, we had 90% of hospitals beds in use in Canada before the pandemic even started. Why are we not having a national conversation on the inadequacies of our healthcare capacity?
https://twitter.com/patrickbrownont/status/14783662450996469...
> Many of the posts are demanding Premier Doug Ford's government repeal Bill 124, 2019 legislation that capped annual salary increases for many public sector employees, including nurses, at an average of one per cent annually for three years.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-health-care-w...
ALC stands for Alternate Level of Care - patient is someone who is occupying an acute care hospital bed but not acutely ill or does not require the intensity of resources or services provided in a hospital setting. In Ontario, there are 5375 ALC open cases. 42.2% (2268) of which are waiting for LTC. Median wait time to get into an LTC from a hospital is 114 days. This is an insanely high number of people tying up hospital resources through no fault of theirs but because of incompetence of LTC. Instead of fixing this, they want to falsely blame the unvaccinated.
> In Ontario, as of Jan. 17, "42% of those awaiting transfer to long term care facilities were unable to find a placement. This amounts to about 2,200 people, and the median wait for an LTC placement for someone in the hospital is a staggering 114 days."
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rupa-subramanya-ontario-uns...
As if this isn't enough, Ontario and Quebec fired unvaccinated health care workers (many of whom had natural immunity from infection) and are now allowing COVID+ nurses to work if they are vaccinated.
How can we claim to provide equitable healthcare when we are denying fundamental freedoms based on discriminatory practices?
There is no pride in a health care system, however “free” it might be, if its existence is fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.
The hospitals have been overloaded and badly managed for a long time, way before the pandemic.
Most hospitals here have been operating above 100% capacity for many years. Waiting time to see a doctor have been reported to take in average 15 hours and up to 20 hours (pre-covid data in 2019) [1]. God forbid if you need to be hospitalized, as it can reach 24-48 hours sometimes.
Firing nurses over COVID measures before Christmas certainly didn't help, which is worth pointing out.
The politicians are trying to shift the blame of the bad healthcare systems happening under their watch to COVID.
[1]: https://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/2fe607e4-1054-4f10-9f56-703...
Agree we designed systems that could barely handle the flu, and we are paying the price. I'm not defending the politicians, certainly not Legault.
Where do we go from here? Fund back to average OECD levels, raise taxes, or honk and yell freedom while healthcare workers burnout?
And yes, a tiny number of nurses were suspended, but it's noticing compared to those who left the field from exhaustion from mandatory overtime and rigid scheduling.
https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-homeless-shelter-receives-7...
You mean surveillance footage like this, of a protestor trying to lock the doors to an apartmnent building and start a fire?
https://globalnews.ca/news/8600592/trucker-convoy-police-inv...
The cops have barely done anything and they've acknowledged there is violence and lawlessness:
https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-police-report-a-night-of-di...
Lots more videos here:
https://www.instagram.com/ottawaconvoyreport/
I literally heard honking today. The only reason there is less honking is because there is a legal injuction and truckers who honk can now be sued civilly. But they still persist.
I don't feel like that's the point you're trying to make but with such minimal activities you can link too and even less with confirmed links it really feels like you're stretching.
You do know that they were NOT the protestors right? And even the Ottawa Deputy Police Chief has debunked it. The supposed "arsonist" was someone who was wearing face masks, had purple hair was was in his early 20s as max. You really think that's a trucker protester?
> Ottawa Deputy Police Chief on the alleged arson in Ottawa: “We don’t have any direct linkage between the occupation—the demonstrators—and that act.”
https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1491152362253451265
Like I said, somehow the "homeless shelter" has zero videos of anything happening. We are living in 2022, not 1950s. Everyone has a video camera phone now a days and somehow not a single person captured such thing?
Your instagram link has not a single video of violence. You really are stretching your narrative.
Honking injunction was ONLY for continuous honking. Despite that, when I was there on Saturday after 9pm, there was no honking. Even if there were, you really think honking is violence?
If you're concerned about getting Canadians back to work, should you not also be concerned with the economic damage done by mandates and lockdowns with no end in sight?
Nobody gets locked down for the flu...
These trucks are extremely difficult to remove. And while you can still remove them if the air brakes are on it takes longer. Not only that, most rig towing companies won't do anything for fear of reprisal.
Can you point to some?
Cameras and cell phones are all over Ottawa and the cell network has been up and working all along. Surely something has been uploaded to YouTube?
If you truly were concerned about violence against innocent people, you'd be on the side of the protesters, not spreading unsourced lies in effort to have them silenced.
Unvaccinated people are not entitled to a job without consequence.
It was loud the first week due to honking but even that's stopped. And even if there were honking, that's not violence.
I am brown and my buddy is black and neither of us met with anything other than friendly hugs and fist bumps. Then we get home and see an entirely different reporting on media and by government.
Here's an article written by a government employee who lives right above the protests:
https://maybury.ca/the-reformed-physicist/2022/02/03/a-night...
EDIT: Reply to comment below, I was personally there because of the air-travel mandate by the Feds and restaurant/gym mandates by my province. Triple vaxxed Trudeau can fly even while he caught COVID. Triple vaxxed Mayor Jim Watson can go to restaurants and gyms despite being COVID+. But I am not allowed to fly or go to restaurants and gyms even if I can show a negative COVID test.
I also talked to nurses there who worked for 2 years taking care of COVID patients, caught COVID along with their entire family, got natural immunity which is superior, and then got fired for not taking the shots. Yet Ontario and Quebec is letting COVID+ nurses to work if they are vaxxed.
Also women are a lot more against the mandates than men based on my impression which seems to match the surveys.
That sentiment was echoed in this podcast I listened to the other night: https://youtu.be/H-T_EGVdYwk
The guy being interviewed is just a dude, not a leader in the movement AFAIK. But he’s probably a good representation of what the average person attending the protests wants.
> surviving a previous infection now provided greater protection against the subsequent infection than vaccination
> Protection against Delta was highest, however, among people who were both vaccinated and had survived a previous COVID infection
So natural immunity is better than only being vaxed, but getting a vaccine increases your protection in both cases.
In order of protection:
1. cleared infection + vax 2. cleared infection 3. vax
Also natural infection antibodies have been shown to last for at least 20 months. We know vaccine one wanes in 3-6 months.
There's also some evidence on those with prior infection having higher chances of side-effects, though more research is needed.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/vaccine-after-effects-more-co...
Some trucks had train horns installed, significantly louder than regular horns. Trucks were honking continuously, all night. There is a line where too much noise can be considered violence. Certainly, if I was downtown and had a baby trying to sleep during that shit I'd be throwing rocks at trucks at 2am.
I see many people say "this person, who is vaccinated but got COVID anyways, is allowed to do X. Other person, who has a negative COVID test but am not vaccinated, cannot. That is hypocritical." Can someone explain the hypocrisy?
People do get that negative COVID tests have relatively little proof value after a day or so right?
The point of allowing a person to do X is based on the safety of them doing X. If we are preventing X due to fear of covid, then it makes sense to prevent people from doing X if they have covid, regardless of their vaccination status, and allowing them to do it if they do not have covid, regardless of their vaccination status.
Some of the rules appear to be punitive towards people who have chosen not to be vaccinated, and not designed to curb the spread of the disease; that is why hypocrisy is being called out.
If more of the population were vaccinated the spread of the disease would be curbed (there are still places under 60% vaccination in the US, for example). It would not be sufficient, but yes the point is to create spaces where you have less risk.
The rule is designed to get more people to be vaccinated. It is accomplishing that objective.
(more nuanced is that I don't believe "vaccinated means everything is OK" is the right position either, and that "vaccinate, but also try to do stuff at half capacity" etc etc would be better but...)
A room with 100% vaccinated people is going to be safer than a room with 100% of people showing up with day-old negative covid tests. (EDIT: actually not sure of this as much now that I'm thinking about it...)
Ultimately the rules forcing vaccination are a result of a huge part of the population refusing vaccination, which is the single most effective policy. It's roundabout because governments don't have the courage to just force the issue (or waited too long and now there's a coalesced movement against it).
Sorry if unvaccinated people feel bad because of it. If they cared about not getting people sick they would vaccinate. Taking covid tests every day doesn't improve your immunity.
But the argument isn't "does vaccination magically solve everything", it's "does it make things better relative to the costs", and that seems absolutely unobjectionable. We can walk and chew bubblegum here, but antivax positions seem to be to do neither out of some vague principle of freedom.
The sad point off this is that you're contagious when you're still asymatic, so even those wanting to do the right thing cant prevent accidental spreading. All we can do is reduce our transmission rates as low as possible. Vaccines did a great job of that pre-omicron and though Omicron seems to spread just as freely in vaccinated populations, those with vaccines had far better health outcomes. Who knows what date will throw at us if/when another significant variant mutates into our lives.
Natural immunity of an unvaccinated person is superior to a vaccinated person without natural immunity, all else equal, and the difference isn't even close. It concerns me that people still don't accept this.
See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... for conclusive proof of this. I don't have my notes on that study in front of me right now but off the top of my head natural immunity was at least 7x superior when compared to people who were double-vaccinated but with no exposure to the actual virus.
Meanwhile we have the CDC showing that:
- previous COVID exposure + no vaccination is 3x smaller incidence than vaccination without covid exposure
BUT
- previous COVID exposure + vaccination is 2x smaller incidence than without vaccination
arguing that "I got exposed to Covid so the vaccine is not useful for me" is factually incorrect. I had not been clear enough in my objection. So protesting vax mandates have even one less leg to stand on.
(at least here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...).
I'm glad you have felt at home at the protests, I'm sure if you tried to ask critical questions about vaccine efficiency and the active participation of far right extremists like Pat King in the protests, you'd have received a much colder welcome.
Thousands of people in Ottawa have been affected by the occupation. At least 1000 workers of the Rideau Center are out of a job because the protestors kept trying to force their way into the shops without masks. Covid is a respiratory disease and the use of well fitting masks are shown to significantly reduce transmission. Why are the protestors ignoring the science behind the policies?
If the protestors are rational, why haven't the protestors called out the loud lunatics amongst them who are on bullhorns shouting how Trudeau is a devil worshipper and pedophile?
Why have white supremacists like Pat King been allowed key roles in the protests, and allowed to - literally - dance on the sound stage set up on parliament hill?
Why did the organisers refuse to answer - earlier today - the simple question from a reporter if there were any firearms present amongst the protestors?
What was the rationale behind the "MoU" that called for the democratically elected government to be deposed and replaced with a junta composed of the protest organizers? That wasn't even a fringe demand, it was front and center.
Nobody from the protests has had any rational answers for these questions. I'm sorry, but for the residents to be able to accept the inconvenience of being occupied, they have to sympathise with the elements of the protests.
Those workers are "out of a job" because of the very COVID policies that the truckers et al are rallying against. COVID did not take away those jobs. COVID policies did.
(I am not even thinking of whether it's justified, good or bad, just reasoning about motivations)
I have issues with asking permission to protest, even if it's an issue I don't support.
The blockades of the border and overwhelming presence of truck/train horns at all hours of the day were the tipping point.
You get to make your point heard to anyone who cares - both to the government and other people - but they don't have to care. If it turns out that general public does not want to hear and support your protest, then you simply wait until elections, and either get what you request or watch your candidate lose and peacefully accept that your requests are simply not going to be met. You don't get to stop the rest of the society until your demands are met, they don't owe you that. If the other voters disagree with your opinion and don't want to listen to it, you don't get to make them listen.
I dare say, if you've got things escalating to the point where people from all over your country plop themselves on the Federal government's front door .. do you not realize how much that actually takes?
If one is so eager to dismiss the minority, then pray tell, how does anyone propose getting any change done? Further, why are you blaming the protesters for making your life more inconvenient when the only person who has been harmed already is...wait for it...them?
Because until that road got blocked, nobody gave a care 1.
That is successful protest. That is the consequence of Statecraft failure.
I mean, for every contentious issue there's going to be a part of the population which does not get their way. The whole point of democracy is that in such situations we discuss the issue, vote on the issue, and then the losers accept the decision and go home without escalating to action. The fact that some people are extremely dissatisfied with some decision does not necessarily imply that the decision should be changed nor does it imply a statecraft failure - how about all the people who supported the decision? Like, if the vote was somehow fake and misrepresents reality, then a protest can show that no, the majority does think differently; but if the protests simply confirm that yes, x% people are opposed, then the protest does not provide any information that deserves attention, the decision was made (and had the right to be made!) already knowing that those people oppose it.
The final escalation point of an ignored protest should be a call for general election if the public believes that circumstances have changed and the current government does not represent the will of the people anymore. However, if elections do not get what the protesters want, they should simply not get what they wanted because "we the people" have spoken that they don't want that. And, crucially, they can continue to peacefully request change and wait for public viewpoints to change, but certainly they have no right to disrupt others unless the demands are met, at some point the society has the right to say "we heard your arguments but made the choice to move on", and require you (with force, if necessary) to stop disrupting normal activities of the society.
I think you've got your view backwards in the sense that every protest you've experienced up until now has been small enough to not be majorly disruptive because that crowd of "I will not accept this" hardliners was small enough where it would literally be folly to belabor the point further. That does not place an effective ceiling on legitimate vs. illegitimate protest, rather it puts a floor on the quality of your Statespeople at doing their jobs in a way that gets enough people not feeling marginalized.
That is clearly not the case here. Each of these protestors is someone feeling they are not being represented. They have the right to hold everything the bugger on up until some level of reasonability comes around. That is the fundamental dimension and action of politics. Just because it's been a good many years since the consent of the governed was pulled back doesn't mean it can't still be.
The number of people pounding the drum of "well these miscreants better watch out, the will of Canada is going to steamroll them!" or "It is the will of Canada that these people be pushed out of the limelight and ignored, so cut off their logistics, make it easier to enact financial violence (fines), and imprison them!" instead of "Well, shit, maybe we did go overboard a bit, didn't we?" disturbs me.
At the end of the day, those people are Canadians too. The mark of a country is how they treat their conscientious objectors.
And yes... I say that with a straight face accepting where the U.S. is on that scale recently. I just hope Canada doesn't follow our lead down the road to hell.
As far as I understand your position, expecting the protesters to back down without satisfying their requests is also not okay - so what would be okay?
I'll be frank. The government committed the first overreach here. These people were hard working, contributing members of society when they were free to do so. That was taken away, and no equitable exchange offered, or convincing justification given besides "father knows best", so I'm not surprised this has blown up as spectacularly as it has. They've been painted with broad strokes by the media as nuisances for making themselves collectively heard. That's what you do in a democracy. The ball is in the government's court to come back to the table, because those prople will still be Canadians at the end of this. So ignoring or squashing the problem won't make it go away.
If the government really has as much support as they think they do, they don't need formal policy, everyone will just do as they do; they just need best practices in place, and people to continue following them. If they actually don't, and the polling has methodology problems, then you're taking a step back toward normalcy and getting people back to work. The fact supposedly, what, two thirds, approve of the measures wasn't necessarily framed in a way where people are taking into account the overall cost in liberties in the long run. I'd have to review methodology.
I'm increasingly finding that as much of a hardline idealist as I tend to be, when dealing with the masses of dissatisfied people, pragmatism is often the better way to go. Get enough of them to leave to decrease the size of the protest. But if you double down on the authoritarian streak, get ready to hemorrhage support. This isn't the kind of thing you get the chance to do twice.
This isn't about protesting "at all" it's about protesting in a way that stings the government. You can protest in a legal way but then you're dismissed. The Truckers are protesting in a way that can't be dismissed. They've chosen to risk serious consequences because to them the status quo is worse. Protests like this are a sign of a failure of leadership and representation.
Sometimes that means you don't get your way. Right now in my country the government in power acts in ways I really don't agree with but unfortunately they won fair and square and clearly have the support of the majority. For me that is disappointing and somewhat embarassing but I wouldn't dream of claiming that elections were fraudulent (USA) or simply ignoring mandate and consensus and trying to blackmail the government (CA).
https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-pro...
Convoy protesters break through Surrey RCMP barricade with military-style vehicle
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/convoy-protesters-break-through-surrey...
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-canada-tr...
This summer will see protests from the other side in North America, and we will see more hypocrisy and what-about-isms cries. Especially when there will be more damage and death resulting from them, sadly. It will be interesting to count how many people who don't see any dual standard now, seeing it in 5 months or so.
The UK at least tries to stop all protests and not just let certain ones go unhinged and supported by opposition politicians. It boggles my mind how the trucker convoy lasted longer than a day, in the UK they would have been towed away and arrested very quickly. There's no need for a state of emergency or to freeze bank accounts. It's normal policing.
Canadas actions and lack of actions before are a kind of worrying symptom of dysfunction at best. Perhaps they are not used to protests? Perhaps they don't have basic common laws about protest, nuisance, decency? That would explain things.
(As an aside, it's a really bad idea to protest in the middle of winter in a freezing country. Thatcher managed to negotiate with coal miners to stop them protesting in the winter, but today's protests are not by critical power supply workers)
This is completely nonsensical, guys like Trudeau or Macron (France) are eroding their power for what looks like petty fights.
I really don't understand what is going on behind the scene.
Part of me thinks this is political theatre to show how strong Canada is, with the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.
The act you're referring to was the War Measures act, which has been repealed.
The funniest thing about the direction the world has taken since 9/11 for me is the extent to which people are being played against each other according to a plan.
The plan appears to start with increasing social disorder from fomenting identity and grievance politics.
At one time the organisation behind the plan was know as the Illuminati but this is now considered not to exist.
Whether the human organisation exists or not society appears to have the emergent quality of implementing the "plan" autonomously.
Imagine how many nutcase truckers there would be with out social media? Imagine how many vaccine and mask karens there would be without social media?
Both sides are wrong and the powers that be want both sides to fight. Divide to conquer.
But alas this is a conspiracy theory and can't be discussed in polite company.
Absolutely hilarious to me is that the organising principle of capitalism is called the "Invisible Hand."
Yes lets all work together and build an Orwellian technocratic hell so that we can get rich individually.
Blind leaders leading blind men in a blind world.
Compete to please the Boss...lol.
There is a fair bit of nuance here, so I'm going to try and clarify a bit of what's going on for those that haven't been following. I'll attempt to provide sources as much as I can, and for some context, I live in Ottawa.
The protesters arrived on January 29th, with a rally at Parliament Hill. The original protest was largely peaceful, in the sense that the majority of the protestors did not harm or assault local residents. However, there is photographic evidence of a protester carrying a flag with a swastika on it[0] and at least one protester with a Confederate flag (who was later asked to leave)[1]. Other objectionable reports include drinking and dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and protesters assaulting and harassing members of soup kitchen[2]. These initial actions didn't exactly endear them to the locals, but in truth, this was surprisingly peaceful given how bad things could have been.
Beyond the first day, however, things largely got worse for residents of Ottawa. Describing things as "honking" is understating it; for the first two weeks, anyone within a few blocks of the protest had to deal with loud truck horns, and aftermarket "train horns", blaring throughout the majority of the day and night. There is documented evidence[3] that long-term exposure to noise is detrimental to human mental health, so for folks living in this area, things have been horrid. Additionally, idling trucks for so long harms the local air quality, especially in buildings that aren't particularly well-sealed... which tend to be occupied by less well-off folks that are either renting or can't afford to retrofit their home.
I won't go into every single case, but in the subsequent few weeks, there have been cases of attempted arson[4], cases where protesters are attempting to handcuff the doors closed on another building[5], and various reports of folks being harassed for wearing masks, for having the pride flag displayed, and more.
The Ottawa Police Service has been completely ineffectual here, doing nothing more than asking protesters or warning them to leave, but not actually taking any enforcement actions against protesters. Even when a court-ordered injunction against honking horns was granted, the OPS has not enforced it.
Additionally, Doug Ford and the Ontario government have been completely absent, skipping 3 straight conferences on how to deal with the protests[6] in Ottawa.
I'm personally deeply uncomfortable invoking the Emergencies Act here. But it's also true that this is probably one of the last remaining mechanisms to actually deal with the protests - not to prevent protesting from happening, but to ensure that they're not harming the lives of local residents that have their own right to safe, secure, and peaceful life. If the OPS or Ontario government had acted in any meaningful way, this would likely have not been necessary.
[0]: https://twitter.com/YoniFreedhoff/status/1487517973422223374
[1]: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/man-with-confederate...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/convoy-tru...
[3]: https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-la...
[4]: https://globalnews.ca/news/8600592/trucker-convoy-police-inv...
[5]: https://twitter.com/AndreaHorwath/status/1492945668838723593
[6]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ford-trilateral-ottawa-bord...
(edited for spelling/grammar)
Hmm, seeing how things are evolving it was the politically astute thing to do. It's win win, cynical but insures a greated measure of electoral survival.
They'll maybe lose the city center voters who couldn't sleep, but that's more or less that. However this concludes, most of it'll land on Trudeau's lap, no so much theirs.
What happens in Canada is the one party rules however they want. On key budget bills and on special days the remaining parties can force a confidence vote. The government either issues threats that they will call an election and it will be some other parties fault or bribes another party.
In the background little parties are broke and need years to get enough cash to fight the an election.
This is in conflict with the message he gave to Indian farmers.
Canada has lost a virtue leg to stand on.
Police and government officials are actually trying to convince the public that "trucks blocking streets is an act of violence".
That's the most non-violent form of protest I can imagine.
While at the same time they are restricting the truckers gasoline that would allow them to both keep warm in these ridiculously cold temperatures and move their trucks out of the streets.
And painting people trying to support the protesters as racists and terrorists.
Goodbye, Canada.
Hello, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
1- https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/hate-crimes-ottawa-protest
2- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blocka...
3- https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/anarchism-convoy-column-don...
That's literally what they're doing. Ottawa is full of legislative buildings.
I understand that a very small fraction of protesters have done violent things.
That does not make the act of blocking streets a violent one.
What will happen however is that the problem just going to be moved elsewhere. Trucks might begin to slow down, citizens might continue to assemble, in Ottawa or elsewhere. How protesters are going to find other ways to protest will be very interesting to watch and how the government will respond will be terrifying.
The truckers assert their livelihoods are already heavily impacted. This crowd appears to be much larger than simply anti-vaxxers.
Also at the time the government didn't have critical infrastructure
Funny how blocking the arteries of power projection by authority always seems to garner a quick response innit?
The government can come and clear it out, then they’ll be another assembly somewhere else by a different group. Unless Trudeau is willing to mass arrests of thousands of Canadians, he won’t stop it.
It seems to be the problem the government has is looking weak - but invoking an Emergencies Act only makes them look more desperate.
My guess is this goes on for a few more weeks while the Canadian gov’t and provinces declare “no more need for Covid restrictions thanks to our amazing handling of the situation”. The govt gets to save face while giving the protestors what they want.
What is OK in India is not OK for Canada it seems.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/situation-is-concern...
Quoting Trudeau: "When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent is when it’s rapidly losing its moral authority to govern" https://twitter.com/justintrudeau/status/205322201187106816
That's a distilled version of a western political crisis. Where parties lost ability to use rational thinking. Everyone needs to be a part of the party that very divisive.
It's very stupid from both sides. One side want to stop entire country for just one medical requirement. Just do the damn vaccine and live your life. It has nothing to do with freedom or political part.
The other side trying lost the opportunity to use omicron as a temporary chance to go back to norm and make requirements easier. Instead they let it blown to a real political, supply and economical crisis.
Why just not be a centrist? Yes, mandate make lots of sense. Right now omicron is so easy. It's doesn't block hospitals. Leave them alone. Encourage others to do the vaccine in a stimulative way, not restrictive.
I'm guessing the more likely option is that the trucker community become "conscientious objectors" and refuse to work, in the hope that their number will cripple services. Does sitting at home still count as terrorism? Because I'd happily fund that
It is not clear to me how deep the support for this cause is among Canadians, but if this group chooses to act by pulling their money out, this would cause even more headaches for Trudeau and his ilk.
Oh wait, Canada isn’t even a republic, just a monarchy. . .
Just a Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy.
Maybe it’s nigh time?
>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;
The right to peacefully protest still stands even with the invocation of this act. The Ottawa police have been incapable of ending this protest because it has been peaceful. Nobody has even raided/trespassed in the capital buildings like the January 6th 'insurrection' in the usa. If the protesters were anything but peaceful, the Ottawa police would easily be able to arrest them. Logically concluding that this protest has been peaceful. You can confirm this to be true simply by watching the myriad of livestreams online.
>3 For the purposes of this Act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
>(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
>(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
>and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
There are an awful lot of 'any other law of Canada' that could be used before this act. Some peaceful protests are not going to justify using this act. In fact not even possible to use this act against peaceful protesters. Trudeau is moving against a foe that isn't described by this protest.
The accusation or allegation by Trudeau is that the USA has a military occupation over Canada. The funding is being organized in the USA.
This to me doesn't ring true. If the USA wanted Canada, a squadron of F22 could annihilate our armed forces in a day. B2 bombers could lay waste to everything else. Canada could do nothing, none of our allies would come to save us. Our allies could never protect us against the USA. Nuclear bombs wouldn't be needed. Plus, we have an extensive and fantastic alliance with the USA. Why would Biden who is worried about Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan invade Canada? It makes no sense.
The alternative is that Trudeau has deployed this against his political opponents who are peacefully protesting.
What do you think?
Tests aren't recognized in Canada. Nor is natural immunity recognized. It's asinine.
Then again, when he was a student, it didn't help even later in that regard having family give a huge shush payout to some underage girl's parent's for an undisclosed bad act.
“get those hospital workers, get those anti-Vaxxers, get those oil consumers, get those truckers, get those protesters; crush ‘em all!” - Shorter Trudeau, today.
https://twitter.com/justintrudeau/status/1394099973709565954
Bonus points because said heavy machinery was assembled into a complex device whose purpose was "area denial".
So technically both senses are satisfied.
Pedantic wordplay aside, the right of assembly is limited to humans, not arbitrary objects.