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