Ontario government staffer fired after $100 donation to Ottawa convoy | Hacker News Reader

Ontario government staffer fired after $100 donation to Ottawa convoy

toronto.ctvnews.ca

131 pointsxqcgrek2169 comments

All: this is a divisive topic. It's also an interesting new phenomenon. That makes it on topic for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and also makes it vulnerable to the tedious, nasty flamewar that we're trying to avoid on HN. Therefore, if you're going to post in a thread like this, could you please review the site guidelines first and make sure to stick to them?

Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Remember that on this site we want curious conversation. Here's an old sentence of pg's that captures the desired spirit:

Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

It is kind of unclear, but in this case, she is not a regular government employee but rather the political staffer of a minister of the government (who in Canada is also an elected official that sits in the legislature). So this isn't like the government terminating a bureaucrat, but rather like a member of congress firing one of their staff.

I'm not clear on the process in Canada. Is this like being a political appointee or more like a traditional government employee? I would certainly understand firing a congressional staffer who was working for a democratic senator and donated to defend the Proud Boys, or equivalent or let's say a Rand Paul staffer who donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign. It shows a conflict of interest. I don't think it would be appropriate to do the same for a GS employee unless that group was advocating the violent overthrow of the constitution.

The person who was fired appears to be non-OPSEU, so she’s not an employee of the Ontario government. My understanding is that she’s the employee of a political organization (in this case, the organization that acts on the behalf a political appointee).

Plenty of non-union workers in government, and (not as many as there used to be) unionized workers in non-government.

Political appointee. Her job exists at the pleasure (and continued holding of office) of her Member of the Provincial Parliament. So say this person lost re-election. This staffer would lose her job as well.

Would it be fair to say this is like a Democrat house staffer getting fired for donating to the NRA? Or a Tory staffer to an MP getting fired for donating to a Labour candidate?

Yes. Those are comparable.

No.

Ontario has a conservative government, and the federal conservative party supported the convoy to some degree, and a few MPs met with truckers.

This would be similar to Democrats firing someone for donating to BLM.

Is there such precedent?

You're confusing the federal conservatives with the provincial conservatives. In Canada, the link between provincial and federal parties is quite tenuous - see the Alberta NPD which is radically different from the federal NPD.

The Ontarian conservatives as far as I'm aware were always against it.

Yes, so more like an Oregon Republican party staffer donating to the Ammon Bundy standoff in 2016. And then the Oregon Republican Party ask that person to resign.

is Oregon ruled by mostly Republicans or Democrats? I thought it was a Democrat state overall, with some rural parts that vote R.

The crucial question, is this the party in power, or not.

In case of Oregon, this appears to be solidly Democrats, not Republicans.

In the incident described in the article, Ontario is governed by the Ontario Conservative Party, and so for the comparison to be valid, it would have to be against a governing party, in case of Oregon that to be Democrats.

Did any Democrat in Oregon fire any staffers, or similar, that donated to BLM? Militants that allied themselves with BLM have murdered people, which AFAIK is something far beyond anything truckers have done.

I have not heard about any donors to BLM being fired over that, and if such precedent exists but for some reason was not widely covered, please post examples, tia.

Just so it’s clear, this is a conservative staffer fired by a conservative government for donating to a far(ther) right cause.

Correct.

Have there been any Democrat staffers fired over donations to BLM?

P.S.

As a working class protest over conditions of employment, one could even frame this into a typical socialist strike type of thing, if it were politically profitable. Some of the left persuasion even worry that this sets precedent for extra-judicial strike funds seizures in the future.

I don't even know how "return to normalcy" (probably the shortest way to summarize the convoy's demands) is right or left, it is quite sad that we are discussing such basic concepts on the basis of blue-red spectrum.

It shows how deeply the false dichotomy has taken root.

It's not a working class protest, neither is it a strike. For a protest to consist as working class, it needs to have the support of the working class - which it doesn't, since trucking unions came out against it. It also needs to be for the interests of the working class, which it doesn't seem to be at all.

It's not a strike either, because they're not withholding labour, they're complaining about not being able to labour.

Also, if you're trying to frame this in socialist point of view, that doesn't work either, because the owners-operators that are the focal point of the protest aren't even working class, from a socialist point of view they're middle class or petit-bourgeois (depending on if they rent out their rig). They also typically make around twice the median wage despite living in a low cost of living, and are much wealthier than the average Canadian.

As far as the frozen funds precedents, I agree.

The trucking union leaders also donate to Justin Trudeau's party and are friends. Saying that these leaders views represent the truckers views is not correct.

Truckers even if they are small business owners can be part of the working class. So can plumbers and other trades who often own their own business.

Framing working class status around money is missing key elements. Someone willing to work with their hands will be looked down by an university employee even if the trades person makes much more.

Was there a class issue in Ottawa? It appears so. Residents were afraid because these Canadians were different. They hide inside and looked for stories of violence. One lawyer on television went as far as to say he hide inside because he felt appeared different in a suit and a mask. Ottawa downtown residents are more likely to be top national lawyer with connections to the elite than to a drywaller.

> Framing working class status around money is missing key elements. Someone willing to work with their hands will be looked down by an university employee even if the trades person makes much more.

It's not about money primarily. It's about social relations. Do you have to answer to a boss? Are you self sufficient? Do you have employees?

That decides what your interests are, who you align yourself to politically and socially, and so on. In everything that matters practically and politically, a tradesperson running their own business is much closer to, say, a freelance programmer or even a lawyer in class interests than any actually working class person.

> Was there a class issue in Ottawa? It appears so. Residents were afraid because these Canadians were different. They hide inside and looked for stories of violence. One lawyer on television went as far as to say he hide inside because he felt appeared different in a suit and a mask. Ottawa downtown residents are more likely to be top national lawyer with connections to the elite than to a drywaller.

That's a question of culture and appearances, not of class, economics, interests or politics. Sure, a resident in the parts they were annoying is more likely to be an elite lawyer than a drywaller, but they're much more likely to be a service worker than either, and you just can't make the argument that someone stocking shelves or doing data-entry isn't working class while a small business owner is.

Because small business owners aren't working class. They don't have a boss trying to make money out of them. They don't have to worry about being fired. They have more than just their brains and brawns to make money for them - they have capital too. They have zero interest in labour rights, in fact, their interest is against them. Their actual interests are orthogonal to the working class.

Beyond that, it's inarguable that the protest organizers wanted to project the aesthetics of violence. You can't say they were trying to conjure up stories of violence when Pat King was out there making threats and talking about actual violence.

> The trucking union leaders also donate to Justin Trudeau's party and are friends. Saying that these leaders views represent the truckers views is not correct.

How do you know that they're friends? Do you have any example of a union that doesn't donate to powerful political parties? Because that's what unions do, they look out for their members. That means playing politics, donating money to sympathetic parties in power, and networking. They sure as hell are closer to the views of truckers in my experience, and they're actually going after the real interests of the average trucker.

In reality, the only thing here are aesthetics. It's all the aesthetics of a working class uprising, with none of the actual substance. None of the things they're fighting for apply to the concern of a typical labourer. Their tactics are completely different - instead of withholding their power and exerting it over their workplaces, they're trying to take the public hostage. There's no mass movement there - they want to go directly against the will and the interests of the majority. Their icons aren't even working class. There's no worker solidarity either, it's all about taking the many hostage and inconveniencing them, instead of showing the masses they have the power to bend society to their will.

It's a middle-class to petit-bourgeois concern trying to pass off as working class aesthetically, but the actual substance contradicts this. That's why the public even supported, for example, teacher's strikes even when they inconvenienced them, but they were never even remotely on board with the convoys.

Have you seen Yanis Varoufakis, one of the most prominent Marxists, on his recent speech/interview circuit where is discussing how in his view the socialist experiment has failed, and we are now living under feudalism?

He calls it techno-feudalism.

What are your thoughts on that?

A legislative staffer donating to an organization outside the jurisdiction of Canada which vowed to ignore Canadian finance laws...

By population, we're a small country. If this becomes a regular occurrence, Canadians are going to need to pay for the tax burden of policing foreign-financed supercharged protest groups!

Beyond that, giving foreigners input on Canadian policy through money is undemocratic.

I miss American benign neglect.

Every single NGO and charity in Canada, including politically active NGOs, can and do receive foreign funding.

It's perfectly legal, and it is very much a regular occurrence.

David Suzuki Foundation at some point received over 50% of its funding from foreign sources.

Quite honestly, the common attitude around this whole foreign funding is "I don't want foreign money funding causes I personally don't like".

Everyone is an internationalist, until that becomes personally inconvenient, in this case politically.

I don't recall that David Suzuki ever cost Canadians significant amounts of money in policing. That's what OP was talking about - the cost of policing. There is also the significant cleanup.

If David Suzuki conducted a protest, then his organization would be expected to pay for the license, the cleanup, and the policing.

I don't know what the final bill will be, but this one event is well into the tens of millions. Nobody from the protest seems too interested in paying for these expenses, and instead are hoping to leave it to Canadians to pay through taxes.

Couldn't they just criminally charge David Suzuki for "counselling to commit mischief" (current charge against the protest "leader") if he says that tree-sitting to stop old-growth fortest destruction is a good idea?

Sounds like democracy costs money to police. It would be much easier to just be able to "clear out" downtown (as the CBC puts it).

Strange how nobody wants to denounce David Suzuki Foundation for getting foreign funding. Suddenly it's now about policing costs, for some reason.

It's almost like there is an approved list of causes/entities that are pre-approved for unlimited amounts of foreign funding.

I hope this comment becomes the top comment because it de-escalates the discussion.

Like most commenters here, i think it's a bad development if people get fired over their political ideas, but getting fired from a political body over political ideas seems less obviously bad.

It still hits all my "people get fired way too easily over opinions" trigger points, but it's decidedly less evil than firing a civil servant who disagrees with the current administration's policies, which is how I read the article title.

It says she specifically works in a law enforcement agency. So her financially supporting criminal activity makes her position untenable.

My cynical take is this is exactly why CTV, which was clearly and strongly biased against the protest when it was happening, decided to publish this particular story right now. Normalization aka boiling the frog. You start with a case in the gray area that generally seems okay, allow people to process it, then move to cases on the other side of the gray area, then move outside of (old) gray area entirely. This happened with so many things recently. Social media is making this process a hundred times more powerful.

The realistic take is that this subject/article will make people upset, which leads to them sharing it with others, leading to more ad views.

That is a key piece of information to keep in mind. We are witnessing the shift of the Overton Window.

I think one of the things people are forgetting lately is that civil disobedience, while a legitimate part of protest, historically has carried with it consequences. Rosa Parks was jailed. So was Martin Luther King. If you're out there trying to fight the system, you have to expect the system to fight back a little. What we're seeing in the past couple of years is this expectation that civil disobedience be easy and consequence-free. "I'll just go down to the protest, snap some pics for my insta, and then go do my laundry later in the evening." "Oh, let's fly over to the Capitol, break some windows, and then next week continue our respectable jobs as realtors like nothing happened."

I think this new batch of middle-class, suburbanite, generally older, and yes, predominantly white protestors is a little shocked to learn what other protesters in the past have known for quite a while.

Your comment has shades of "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences," which in my opinion is used to put all the responsibility onto the speakers and none on the reactions of the recipients of the message. I'm not saying your intent was to communicate that, but I feel like that's often the interpretation.

People aren't forgetting that civil disobedience means being uncomfortable, hurt, or jailed. For example, just because a protester reacts with contempt about what the mounted police did to two people doesn't mean that they were naive about the possibilities it might happen. One is a conscious, thinking awareness and the other an emotional reaction. Both can exist at the same time.

MLK wrote: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue"

The ironic part is that the state trying to impose consequences are usually part of the tension. The more aggressive that the state responds, the more tension is created. And that eventually leads to change.

We aren't talking about a modern Rosa Parks. This person did not engage in civil disobedience, they simply donated $100 to a cause they supported.

I would say "working class" instead of middle class.

I make 220k and can't afford a house without taking massive amounts of debt.

The middle class is dead in the majority of Canada. Labor is being devalued exceedingly fast. There's little reward in working hard.

What work really gives you is the ability to purchase stocks, crypto and potentially receive newly minted currency from a bank in the form of a real estate loan.

You have to take a seat at the gambling table.

> Rosa Parks was jailed.

Are we at the point where jailing of Rosa Parks is somehow used to mock and chastise people who just participated or supported a civil liberties protest? This is some bizarre mental gymnastics.

I wonder if the authorities will be as quick to prosecute the leaker, who openly admits in public to breaking the law, as they are to attack the doners who have broken no laws and are entitled to privately support whatever side they choose.

Didn't he just query a publicly accessibly s3 bucket? What law did he break exactly?

Even if the info was easily accessible, it seems to me that distributing PII should be against some laws.

If you forget to lock the door to your house, am I allowed to go inside and start taking pictures of everything?

More fair analogy would be leaving your stuff outside, than inside but under unlocked door.

I believe so, and that is a fair question. Also, I haven't seen proof that he was the only one. Did you watch the videos he posted? If so, what do you think about the situation?

The whole thing is an awful mess.

So if you use a version of Windows that is not updated and has a backdoor, is that fair game for "hackers" as well? It is "publicly accessible" for all intents and purposes. When does it become fair game? In the first day? 100th day? after 2 years?

Any proof? Did Amazon confirm this? I know there was a file there that said the bucket was public, but that could have been added by the hackers as misdirection to sow doubt.

I wonder what the RBAC permission history is for the bucket. If that's obtainable, the answer should be obvious.. if it was open from the beginning.

Payment data, including card data, was obtained as well. This would not be held by the crowdfunding platform, but by the payment processor only, that are subject to quite a few rules and annual audits.

Definitely a hack.

Besides, opening unlocked doors can still get you charged with break and entry, or in this case, unauthorized access.

This sort of highlights how the dividing mechanism works. You pick a group of people known for some fairly reasonable (asking to end mandates that have little effect given the ~90% vaccination rate anyway) and other unreasonable (blocking highways) actions, and you switch focus from the exact actions to affiliation and support.

Then you can convince the public to turn against your political enemies by framing their support for the cause as support for the unreasonable actions, ignoring any good faith intent they might have had. You double down on this by finding some fringe groups (e.g. actual neo-nazis) sharing the same identity (e.g. being white) and linking them to the person you are trying to destroy, and the public eats it up, completely ignoring the matter of the discourse.

The only way we can stop it is start distinguishing between affiliation and concrete actions. "Blocking traffic is bad" or "vaccines should be available, but not enforced if the hospitals are not overflowing" are much less divisive statements than "freedom convoy and all their supporters are bad".

Edit: funny how this comment's karma keeps swinging up and down. I guess, this take itself is somehow divisive these days. I truly wonder what stance could be accepted a fair compromise by both sides...

You're arguing using logic against those who, as I've said elsewhere in this thread, are fully ensconced in the red vs. blue, left vs. right, us vs. them primitive human false dichotomy.

I wonder if there are other interesting things going on with a desire for safety. The language used of "hurt" and "healing" in some of the press conferences and the lawsuit makes it seem like the feelings police are in charge in Canada and they're going to make sure you're happy: https://youtu.be/wZK5ixf4o7Q?t=699

In this interview with a resident of the downtown area who seems to have had to initiate legal injunctions while the police and apparently all the city authorities did nothing I am torn between sympathy for someone being inconvenienced and a sneaking feeling that an unpleasant situation is being exaggerated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G86OL0YyHw

I was watching those after listening to the excellent Bungacast which tries to dissect the recent use of "trauma studies" to understand the evolution of the neo-liberal state under its most recent pressures https://bungacast.com/2021/12/14/231-new-class-analysis-ft-c...

Canada does not seem as though its ready to deal very minor, low-level political dissent and is incompetently defaulting to maximum authoritarianism.

Latest news seems to be that a woman was trampled and seriously injured by a police horse.

I think this is just one example of the continued erosion of private space. We see innocuous examples in social media platforms where day to day life becomes performance, pornography where the intimate becomes a public display, twitter where otherwise passing thoughts become matters of public record, and now where private financial support of political causes can be openly used against someone.

I am envisioning a world where employees undergo regular transaction background checks to ensure that they align with their employers stated mission. Is it inevitable?

With the world nearing a cashless society it will be easy for intelligence services to serve this data on a silver platter.

That would make us no better than China with their social credit system.

Already happens. Here you can lookup anyone in the US https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/

They already frequently ask for your social media handles and sometimes for your passwords.

The progressive utopia we've always dreamed of.

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? You've been doing primarily that, and that's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of what they're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any public signs that explicitly state “Protesting Permitted”…with that in mind, I guess any protest can be called an occupation. Some very sad times we’re living through!

In democracies, what is not forbidden IS permitted. Also, many democratic counties explicitly state the right to a “peaceful assembly”

That is generally true, but I think nothing to do with democracy per se?

It's just more practical to black-list behaviours than white-list them isn't it?

What you describe, right to act if not explicitly prohibited, is usually associated with a constitution. The constitution crystallizes the structure.

A democracy is the larger group voting to take whatever they want from the smaller group. Some democracies are constrained in what they can take by a constitution, and others not so much.

In the case of Canada, the right to freedom of assembly is enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is the highest law of the land and supercedes all other laws and acts, even the Emergencies Act, which by law must conform to the charter.

That is why despite claims by the government and the police that these protests or occupations are unlawful, no one - not a single person has been charge with protesting illegally. The most the police could do was charge the leaders with mischief.

Instead of charging the protesters, the police have been rounding them up, driving around in circles, and then letting them go free. This is not because the police are being kind. It is because they don’t want to risk a court challenge of charter violations which would set a dangerous precedent that would risk the future credibility of the government and the police in similar situations.

Is there a form of declaratory judgment in the courts? To get controversy settled.

I have definitely seen "parade route" signs taped to lampposts in advance in my city. Pretty sure that most large protests require permits and advance notice so that extra police can be made available, traffic can be rerouted, the protest's own route and scope can be approved. Because otherwise every protest would outdo the next to take the most disruptive form possible, so as to get maximum publicity.

Large protests routinely coordinate with police, get permits, etc. "Peaceful assembly" rights of protestors have always been in conflict with "being able to cross the sidewalk / being able to sleep at night" rights of bystanders. In most countries there are administrative processes to get permits for large demonstrations, protests, or even just getting the police to block off streets for you to use (even if the message is against the police).

In USA when the two big political organizations have their State(s) and then national convention, they have a protest / free speech zone. It's usually near where convention delegates can walk and is enclosed by a separation fence.

"unlawful, illegal occupation"

Has it been established that that is what it was? Serious question, I didn't follow the details closely enough.

Canada’s protest laws are different (and much more limited) than those of the US. Any protest that significantly disturbs the peace is not protected.

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

Isn't significantly disturbing the peace kinda the entire point of protest? I would wager many of the protests and demonstrations done during the Civil Rights Movement in the US "significantly disturbed" the peace, and yet they were effective at creating needed change.

A protest almost by definition is a disturbance of the peace - otherwise it’s just a gathering of like minded people doing something.

> Isn't significantly disturbing the peace kinda the entire point of protest?

No.

Again, Canada is not the US.

> Section 2(c) guarantees the right to peaceful assembly; it does not protect riots and gatherings that seriously disturb the peace: R. v. Lecompte, [2000] J.Q. No. 2452 (Que. C.A.). It has been stated that the right to freedom of assembly, along with freedom of expression, does not include the right to physically impede or blockade lawful activities: Guelph (City) v. Soltys, [2009] O.J. No. 3369 (Ont. Sup. Ct. Jus), at paragraph 26.

So an hypothetical protest that, for example, had set up on the lawn of parliament or major’s hill park and did not sound loud horns at random hours of the night would not be dispersed.

Yes but Canada doesn't work like the US. They don't have constitutional free speech or rights to assemble.

My link is to the section from our charter on the freedom of assembly. Our freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are understood differently than yours.

Our Charter is not an analogue to the US constitution. It can be suspended (and routinely is) by the government.

The charter is explicitly part of the Canadian constitution. The notwithstanding clause or override is only very rarely invoked (and in many provinces has never been invoked).

It has been used repeatedly, and it's not just provinces either, the federal government can also use it. It's not really rare, it crops up every few years.

Legislation invoking the clause has been enacted only five times across all of Canada. In one of those cases no rights were suspended and invoking it was unnecessary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_C...

I would count 4 invocations that actually did something (all of which were limited to single provinces) across the past 40 years to be fairly rare.

Actually, the first invocation was an "Omnibus" invocation, which contained around a dozen separate invocations in itself. Beyond that, no, even 4 invocations isn't small at all. A single invocation is potentially devastating. It's been completely normalized in Quebec, for example.

I consider this notwithstanding clause as a public embarrassment. It basically castrates our freedoms.

You can have a successful protest that doesn't disturb the peace simply by gathering a large enough number of people to demonstrate that there's significant support for your demands.

Disturbing the peace will also inconvenience other people who might not have had an opinion before, but end up opposing your protest simply because they want to live their lives undisturbed. Unless you have a realistic plan to seize power, remaining peaceful is probably a better idea.

I remember when Toronto was suffocating because of garbage removal workers strike. More than that when we finally started to bring garbage to commercial dumping sites those were blocked by strikers and they would allow only few people per hour to make huge line ups. IANAL but this looked like mischief to me. And when people out of frustration had started throwing garbage bags in front of the site bylaw officers were right there issuing big fines.

More than that, I tried to talk to strikers and they were fucking boozed up to their gills. That is despite laws against public intoxication.

Police were ignoring all of this. So the government was totally fine with strikers "disturbing the peace". From what I see they're very selective on what to enforce and when.

Exactly. However, in the world of those who long ago fell prey to the "red vs. blue" or "left vs. right" false dichotomies, there is only the question of "what side are you on?" One is not allowed to point out hypocrisy or plausible hypotheticals where the exact same decision-making in the future will be turned against those for whom the decision-making is currently convenient.

I think that's important.

I don't have citations, but my understanding is that what the truckers are doing directly is illegal, but that police haven't taken action in order to avoid violence or to fuel the grievances of the protesters.

Is it illegal or violent to donate to them?

The federal government made it illegal with the emergencies act, this donation almost certainly came before that though. More relevant is that the Ontario government asked a court (which was granted) to freeze all funds related to the convoy.

So maybe not illegal as much as just a terrible look for the party.

mischief is considered a criminal offence, referring to the deliberate or reckless damage of someone’s property or the act of interfering with someone’s property.

So these folks who have been camped in downtown Ottawa, and blockading bridges are in fact committing unlawful acts. And mischief is pretty well the low water mark for what some of these folks are getting charged with

Honest question, it seems this was tied to her via initials and email…

Couldn’t anyone in theory have made a donation in her name ? Or with those pieces of information if they knew them?

That's what's reported here, but considering that it already happened maybe there's a more incriminating detail not disclosed (i.e. bank/card details)? Otherwise it would be definitely a hasty fire.

Maybe she didn't deny it like the other person in the article? Maybe she thought the state would not fire dissidents for donating to rallies/strike blockades. It says something about Canadian labour laws.

I guess it is a culture thing. In France these kind of protests are very common.

Those are concerns for due process, which is out the window in this situation.

What exact due process are we looking for here? If I donate to an extremist organization, and my boss finds out, is he required to still continue to employ me? Or can my boss only fire me if a government takes me to court?

Is my boss allowed to fire me because my job performance is poor? Or does he have to wait till the government puts me in jail for being a shitty sys admin?

I do find this idea that speech doesn't carry consequences really foreign and odd.

If your boss is firing you for your political beliefs you might have a lawsuit. Anyone who doesn't vote for the candidate Google's ceo decides will be fired?

>Couldn’t anyone in theory have made a donation in her name ? Or with those pieces of information if they knew them?

Sure, but while linking a person in the first place might be challenging in most donation systems, DISproving a false information donation should be fairly trivial right? While never having used it, looks like GiveSendGo uses credit/debit cards for underlying payment. That means the transaction history is well recorded and traced if you actually wish to share it. If someone was accused of using it and hadn't, they could prove it with a financial transaction list for that period, or subpoena GSG for the name on the card used or a bunch of other ways. Being in the standard financial system means everything is recorded in a centralized manner, which can be a bad thing for privacy but useful in a case like that. You can show that no money came from any account of yours.

I'd imagine there was more investigation than that. As a gov employee she may be obligated to disclose some information that might otherwise be private. Working in a law enforcement agency while sponsoring activity labelled as criminal seems a conflict of interest that's likely against her terms of employment.

I don't watch the news so I had a lot of catching up to do.

I found this source: https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

More or less, some of the organizers have been tied to xenophobic statements and political movements. Others have been tied to militias. Others are just normal people.

You also forget that the government of Canada invoked an act intended to be used in the most extreme circumstances when normal political, democratic processes were obviously impossible to follow. In addition they have induced GoFundMe and the banks to interfere with the privately held accounts of individuals and publically raised funds.

All this after weeks of doing little to nothing and apparently not negotiating with the protestors.

This would all be understandable, but questionable, in a war situation. It is very disturbing, to say the least, to see the sledgehammer of this act being used to crack the relatively small nut of a noisy, inconvenient petition for redress of wrongs by people who seem to still accept that they are citizens of a democratic state.

(Also, this is all the fault of the USA. Or the Russians. )

This is fault of the US or Russia how?

Most media here has suggested variously that they are "concerned about Russian influence", that the majority of the funding has come from the United States etc. They're whipping up a new War on Terror (currently funded by US extremists) in order to justify increased police militarization and the use of extra-ordinary and unnecessary measures.

They are saying they cannot deal with the situation normally while simultaneously refusing to meet with the truckers and eschewing ordinary policing for weeks beforehand.

Yanis Varoufakis is onto something with the death of of social democracy and capitalism and their mutation into something new and nasty.

Can't wait to see what happens when the irreversible climate change starts to affect people's standard of living.

There is the question: can this be legally done?

Then there is the question: should this be done?

XKCD 1357 has long been championed by those who would quickly answer yes to both questions.

Freedom of speech is not just a legal matter, it's a principle of a free society. Once the public stops supporting it for altruistic reasons, they'll quickly find out, this process comes for you too.

We are at that point in history where your financial moves will have direct impact on your life. The small fish even, those who donate $100, are no longer too small to cancel.

This is a tragedy. Leaked, hacked data being used to fire and harass everyday people is a slippery slope that we are already slipping down.

In the not so distant past, a staffer supporting white supremacists financially would get you an invitation to certain BBQs or a pat on the back.

Today, it's increasingly (although not universally) a liability. I'm OK living in a world with consequences for supporting secessionists and white supremacists.

No idea why this is flagged. The organisers of the occupation and the GoFundMe are known to be white nationalists or neo-nazis. https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

You seem to be implying that the protestors were white supremacists, do you have a source for that claim?

Take a look at the organizers:

1 - Tamara Lich, secessionist and founder of the Maverick Party which has some unkind words for immigrants https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/jay-hill-wexit-top-gu...

2 - BJ Dichter - Promoter of the "political islam" and "great replacement" theory https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

3 - Pat King - Member of far-right hate group Canada Unity https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

Well, as a first generation immigrant myself, I myself completely oppose the current policy of stuffing an increasing amount of newcomers into the same infrastructure, same overcrowded cities same number of hospital beds, etc. This is a race to the bottom where everyone suffers.

I myself moved to Canada because it used to be a society where you can play by certain rules and get a better life quality than in my home country where people lost trust in each other, government, or the rules. This is very rapidly ceasing to be the case. If you look at Indian subreddits, you can see plenty of disenchanted people realizing that being middle class at home is better than sharing a condo with 5 other people in Canada. I see many Russians and Chinese coming back because the bang for the buck is just not there anymore.

Canada's solution to it is to welcome and embrace anyone who's willing to put up with the steadily lowering life quality, for the sake of generating returns on the previous generations' investments. I don't think this is correct, I don't think this will end well, and I don't think it's fair to call anyone objecting to it "far-right" and "immigrant-haters".

I think what you're saying is that we need to invest in infrastructure to support our growing population, which is not a controversial statement.

Please forgive me, but you seem to indicate that the quality of life in Canada is falling and that immigration is the cause. Does this mean that you believe that you yourself reduced the quality of life in Canada for Canadians?

I for one don't agree with this. One simple reason is that I don't buy the premise.

I'm not aware of any evidence that the quality of life of Canadians is degrading in any way that correlates with immigration, and certainly not aware of any causative explanations. Here are a couple of (totally imperfect) financial metrics for purchasing power and Gini coefficients that seem stable.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200728/cg-b0...

https://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm

My grandparents immigrated from Italy, and so I'm (at least historically speaking) recent product of immigration. I don't feel right making the argument that, up until my grandparents came here, immigration was OK, but afterwards, we should have shut the door. Feels a bit too convenient of an argument, especially when, generations later, their offspring (hi!) are occupying many of the medical services and infrastructure you say are crowded.

Your grandparents came at a different time with different skills from a poorer place relatively speaking.

If new immigrants are finding the quality of life to be lower than expected because rents are higher and opportunity to buy a house is lower than your grandparents era you have to agree that the quality of life may be the same for newcomers. Plus the quality of life in China and India is higher than ever.

If you're saying that the quality of life in China and India is rising, bully for them! An ideal world would see immigration primarily motivated by preference and not poverty or oppression.

I would, however, suggest that "quality of life" doesn't begin and end at house prices but also is tied to e.g.: civil freedoms, which you'll find Canada scores much higher than either you examples here by large margins in any (incomplete/flawed, etc...) freedom index [0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World

The bottom line is I don't see evidence for Canada's "fall from grace" and even less for it being tied to immigration.

The sentiment is Canada/west use to be golden ticket/easy mode for privileged immigrants who were top of their respective societies, i.e. one was better off driving taxis in Canada than be a doctor in China. But over the last 10-20 years, QoL of even high-income in west is feeling more and more inferior than staying in the "old country". Caveat being which "old country". If your from Italy that's stuck in it's own western devolution cycle, you won't feel it. But if you're Chinese, Indian, or from some other rapidly developing economy, and see their peers get wealthy back home, live like kings due to purchase power and income disparity, without all the racial drama of multicultural societies - there is serious FOMO. Meanwhile 2nd gen PoC kids raised in western societies are grinding through 6 figure jobs like a chump while dealing with intersectional drama * . Right now, the feeling is being top in PRC or India affords better life on multi-generational scale than being high-income (6 figure) in the west which still won't guarantee your kids won't be grinding.

* It's hard to emphasis the value of not dealing with being a PoC / feeling like an outsider. It's a kind of "freedom" available back home that for many outweighs western liberal values like free speech etc.

As I said to the other commenter, if the QoL is rising in other nations, bully for them! Quite sincerely. No one is twisting your arm to move anywhere, and I think it's wonderful if you're born in a country you don't feel an obligation need to move from to evade poverty or oppression. That's the case for me and I would love if it was for everyone.

The "drama" of multicultural societies as you state it, however, is known as freedom to many others. Ask any Uyghur. If you're indifferent to this, then your values are fundamentally different to those of Canadians as laid out by our Charter of Human Rights, and you might not enjoy living here by our laws.

Do you also believe BLM protest were marxist, because the organizers were trained marxists (their own words)?

Can a white-supremacist help an old lady a cross the street because of his kindness or does he always have an ulterior white-supremacist motive?

What are the demands from the protesters that make this protest white-supremacist?

At what point do platforms like GiveSendGo anonymize payments for real? (realize this is potentially a leading question about cryptocurrency mixers, but maybe there's a way to implement this with regular currencies)

I'm all for traceability, but I can't see donating anything through GiveSendGo if all my data is going to be leaked. Same with Kickstarter. They're just creating a honeypot/target for hackers.

you can't. not until the AML laws get repealed.

The payment processor was hacked as well, and all payment data, including card data was leaked.

Amazingly, the entire 5GB archive was made available to journalists for "research", who then began promptly dialing everyone for "comments".

Twitter refuses to this day to take down tweets that include personal data, despite their policy on hacked data.

> Twitter refuses to this day to take down tweets that include personal data, despite their policy on hacked data.

It's actually even worse than if they just never enforced their policy on hacked data. What they actually do is selectively enforce it, apparently based on which side of the political spectrum would benefit. For example, remember that they did take down all of those tweets about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop, citing that policy as justification.

ooo what about some kind of zero knowledge proof that proves citizenship but nothing else.

Using leaked, hacked data that reveals a member of government contributing materially to a movement for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity against the government is not what I'd call a slippery slope...

By that logic every member of Canadian (and even other nations governments) who support BLM, Antifa, etc should be fired as well.

If they were political staffers for a party that opposed such things, they would be.

If they were contributing to a campaign by one of those groups to break Canadian law, then yes.

Laws are written and imposed by the government, and a government employee actively supporting the breaking of the law is simply unacceptable. That's not how we do things in Canada.

Can you imagine a scenario where such a donation both:

1) Contributes to a “law breaking” cause

2) Still aligns with your views?

It’s easy to talk about the correctness of this when the infringement seems pretty harmful/disruptive.

But social change is often messy, and protests often move into a grey area that is not so easy to judge. Whether you agree with this particular action, it raises much bigger questions than the current unfolding event.

I can absolutely imagine such a situation, but my position doesn't change.

For government, there's only one impartial way to deal with this: Either it's legal, or it isn't. Any moral or ethical judgment will happen later after the movement succeeds or fails, but for the time being you either work with the law, or you leave the government. If you're found to be working against the laws of the land, that's more than ample reason to be kicked out of government.

> Either it's legal, or it isn't

In justice there is enormous scope for discretion and mercy. That used to be a value common on the left, no longer.

That's never been the case for a member of government working against their own government (left or right or anything). You can't keep someone around who works against the very organization they purport to work for.

> That's never been the case for a member of government working against their own government (left or right or anything)

Will you elaborate on what you’re trying to say here? Are you implying that a different legal framework is applied to government officials than that applied to civilians?

> You can't keep someone around who works against the very organization they purport to work for.

I understand where you’re coming from on the one hand, but I can’t help but feel this is an extremely dangerous sentiment on the other.

“Working against” can be defined very broadly, and at least in some circumstances, people in the public arena are there to do exactly that, but this is usually framed as working for something. Elections tend to shift who sits in those positions.

To someone with opposing viewpoints, it may be seen as “working against”.

If this staffer had rolled their own truck out to join the convoy, that’d be one thing. But automatically equating a donation to an act akin to the same seems like the start of a slippery slope at best.

Would you feel differently if this individual had donated to the party affiliated with the goals of the convoy instead of the convoy itself? At what point does donating to a party become an act worthy of discipline? It’s worth noting that I’m not familiar with any rules/regs specific to a public official and the donations they make, so I’m genuinely curious here.

Don’t get me wrong: I in no way align with the goals of this convoy and admit to feeling a tiny bit of satisfaction at what happened here.

But if I take my personal feelings out of it, the whole situation makes me very uncomfortable.

> Are you implying that a different legal framework is applied to government officials than that applied to civilians?

There's no legal framework to apply. This person isn't being jailed or charged with a crime. They're just being expelled from their government position for a specific reason.

> “Working against” can be defined very broadly, and at least in some circumstances

Almost anything can be defined broadly, especially a short comment on a forum. I'm not defining a legal framework here, or coming up with a legally airtight document (such a document would be thousands of pages long). This is a comment on a forum to discuss a particular event where someone was ejected from government for financially supporting a campaign to commit illegal acts. We're also talking about the Canadian government here, not the Belarusian government.

> They're just being expelled from their government position for a specific reason.

Granted the story is about a political employee being fired but it's in the context of people's fundamental freedoms being taken away with no judicial process and no recourse. That is an egregious abuse of power and threatens everyone, not just the supporters of the maligned cause du jour. 20 years ago when the draconian anti-terrorism laws were being brought in across the world it was predicted that it would lead to the crushing of political freedoms and this is an example of that occurring. Back then it was islamist terrorism, now terrorism is being extended to include practically anything that the illiberal left doesn't like.

> break Canadian law

Tiananmen Square protesters broke Chinese law but China violated their human rights. China was in the wrong regardless of how much popular support they manufactured.

Was the activity found to be illegal by a court where the defendant had ability to defend themselves with assistance of an attorney of their own choosing?

There are parallels between this event and the takedown of the British National Party. Around 2009 an insider leaked their member list, in a similar fashion. The same year antifa was activated to protest the BNP. From my recollection, antifa where always considerate enough to inform the police when they planned to protest a protest, or clash with a political group like this. The clashes with police help the story spread. It is the physical manifestation of an ideological conflict. At the time, I was generally supportive of antifa (remember, they where brand new then, although technically founded earlier, they had been dormant for a long time). However, despite the BNP declining into irrelevance after this, they where replaced by UKIP, and the far right, in Britain, has probably never been bigger than it is today. The publicized clashes between antifa and the right, ended up beeing useful recruitment propaganda to both sides. To the people on the right, it was proof that the far left was dangerous and intent on suppressing opposing political views. And vice versa.

This goes to show that the freedom convoy does represents and has support from a varied and large part of the population

Every action this government takes makes the situation more cringe... Imagine Russian government doing anything closer, it would be 24/7 TV coverage how authoritarian dictator goes against the people

The few times I've donated money to anything in the past decade or so, including to relatively uncontroversial recipients, I've done it by mailing cash in an envelope with no return address. That was partly to avoid cancellation, but also it was to avoid the recipient putting me on a donor list so they could keep hounding me for more.

In one case the recipient became controversial after I sent the cash (earlier it had only been a little bit edgy or fringey) so I'm glad that I used that approach. Not worth getting hassled over $20.

Persons unknown hack givesendgo. They publish this on social media, doxing the people making donations.

Are persons unknown a government agency acting as black hat hackers, or are they actually private persons.

Either way, is it right for Twitter to leave this information up?

What if it turns out to be a government agency?

How is it right for a government to make use of information obtained in this way? What about due process rights?

It's one thing for a private employer to fire an at will employee, but don't we expect our government officials to follow due process?

It isn't persons unknown... credit has been claimed.

Is there a simple explanation of why these donation aggregators like GSG even exist? If I want to donate money to X, why can't I send the money directly to X instead of through an intermediary like GSG?

What is the definition of "political staffer" here?

Is that someone who is hired as an assistant by an elected politician (i.e. a spin doctor)? And in general is booted out if the someone new gets elected in. Or is it a civil servant who would stay on regardless if the politician change?

In the former case, it is understadable that you would want someone under you who shares your politics. In the latter case obviously it shouldn't take place.

> Is that someone who is hired as an assistant by an elected politician (i.e. a spin doctor)? And in general are booted out if the someone new gets elected in. Or is a civil servant who would stay on regardless if the politicians change?

The former.

Does anyone have a good link to a rundown of the situation in Ottawa and how it’s come about?

As someone somewhat out of the loop on the situation I would love to read up on what actually has happened and why. Here in the UK we have a fair bit of political controversy of our own dominating the papers so it’s not had much coverage (as far as I can see, although I may live under a rock).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest

Do you think wikipedia is a good resource for (insanely) controversial topics like this?

(I'm genuinely asking the question. I really don't intend to be snarky or anything.)

From my personal experience, wikipedia seems to be a great resource for uncontroversial topics (like a math theorem or something) but can be extremely biased.

It is absurdly biased, you're not alone in that experience, it is patently obvious that wikipedia is extremely left-biased

Oh yeah I'm sure Wikipedia isn't going to have any biases here

Can you give a couple of examples of sources that you consider to be free from bias with respect to political movements?

Ok I'll wait patiently here for your unbiased sources. GP asked for a rundown of the situation and I posted a Wikipedia article, I don't think that's unreasonable.

For what it's worth, https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows... is providing a live feed of discussion in parliament. (I'm not sure whether this is accessible from outside Canada.)

Ignoring the wider issues, is this specific headline concerning or interesting? Of course they would be fired. They’re contributing money to a protest movement against their bosses that is deemed unlawful. You can’t expect to work for the government and fund a movement against that same government.

Why not? Is everyone that works for the government supposed to hold exactly the same opinions and political leanings? If a staffer in a Republican area of the US donated to BLM and was fired, would there be a different reaction?

She doesn't work for the government, but rather is a political staffer of the government of the day.

So imagine that the communications director to the Lieutenant Governor of a GOP state donated to BLM.

i would certainly expect your scenario to play out as you stated.

Some organisations are simply illegal to give money to; this has long been a "War On Terror" thing. It is not clear whether that actual process applied here or whether this is just private action.

Certainly in the US if you are an at-will private employee you can be terminated for any reason or no reason at all, except for explicitly protected classes. Political affiliation is not a protected class, at least not on a Federal level, although a few states have varying degrees of protection [0] that may have protected this staffer. As for government employees, the situation is more complicated. If you are a low-level government employee, your political affiliation is not valid grounds for being terminated. However, employees who are considered as placed in "policymaking" [1] roles, which would include being an "adviser" [1] of some sort, would be able to be terminated according to US standards.

[0] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

[1] Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976). Also see Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, 497 U.S. 62 (1990).

Hasn’t the US just gone through 6 years of protests against the government that have been a lot more violent than this, and I don’t recall anyone being fired for donating.

If the rule is you can’t use civil disobedience and be employed by the government, that rule is being unevenly applied.

Exactly, I'm certain that many here cheer when there are protests that explicitly are about a government stepping down.

Think about the thousands and even millions that demanded Trump resign, that Obama resign, that Putin resign, that Modi resign, that Macron resign, and so on.

What's this got to do with the US?

Well it's a big government isn't it? Surely they could reassign her to communicate for her bosses on some other matters?

It was also retroactively deemed unlawful.

It would be like donating to BLM and then the government using emergency measures to shut down the protests like freezing bank accounts of those involved and then you lose your jobs and your accounts are frozen by the government and anyone that doesn't help the government stop the protest can be prosecuted by the government as well.

A lady in Ottawa who owned an ice cream shop was harassed because the information was leaked but in her mind she was supporting truckers that were out in the freezing weather protesting instead of working and still needed food and shelter.

People donate to protests and causes on a whim that get popular on social media all the time. I imagine a lot of people were donating to support some of the most thanklessly hard-worked people in society, truckers, that worked throughout the pandemic bringing back goods for the lucky people that could stay at home. The backgrounds of some of the initial organizers (some who are legitimate white supremacists) was not known initially and I imagine the majority still don't know and are instead protesting what they see as unnecessary mandates for truckers to get vaccinated even though they drive their trucks alone, and there's no indication that truckers are the cause of the spread of COVID.

I'm having an extremely hard time imagining people being okay with this and if you just change the protest cause just a bit I think it helps make clear why this is so dangerous.

This is dumb. The government shouldn't limit free speech (donations) from regular citizens.

Hopefully she sues GiveSendGo for leaking the source of her anonymous donation.

Seems like a valid next step, hold leaky honeypots accountable. Anyone holding onto user data these days should be nervous.

Well, good thing this sort of open-ended extrajudicial punishment with no possibility of due process or appeal will only be used against Politically Bad people, so we don't have to worry about it.

You can fire your employees for PR reasons in Canada. There is no due process or appeal, because it's a valid reason to fire your employees as a politician. If you don't like this, you can lobby for stronger labour protections.

If she was a government employee, then she wouldn't have been fired, as their union would have protected them.

She will get paid probably a month pay for every year worked.

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