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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> In particular, it was about giving the government of Canada the permanent power to freeze, without trial or legal recourse, all the bank accounts and other assets of anyone it decides was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ in an ‘illegal protest.’

Is this actually true? According to [0] "The Declaration expires after 30 days unless an extension is confirmed within specific timelines by both the House of Commons and the Senate.". I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.

[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-justice/news/2022/02/can...

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Your read is correct.

While I generally agree with the alarm raised by this article, I find it does itself a disservice by exaggerating and citing to Americans with, charitably, a passing understanding of Canadian law and government.

If people would like a dispassionate/neutral reading of the legal obligations imposed by the invocation of the Emergencies Act, I can recommend:

- a summary by Osler, a prestigious Canadian law firm [1]

- the order itself [2]

- the regulations themselves [3]

They are bad enough on their own without embellishment.

For additional context, I have never voted for the Liberal party. Federally, I have donated to and voted for Conservative and Green candidates my entire life. My current MP (a Green MP), voted against the Emergencies Act. I approved of that vote. But it is just absolutely bizarre to me to see people comparing Trudeau to Hitler, Stalin and Mao, as is done in the punk6529 Twitter thread that is embedded in this article. There is plenty to criticize without undermining yourself by using these stupidly emotive comparisons.

[1]: https://www.osler.com/en/blogs/risk/february-2022/new-emerge...

[2]: https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2022/2022-02-15-x1/html/s...

[3]: https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2022/2022-02-15-x1/html/s...

Good links.

In addition this interview by en ex-CSIS (Canadian spycops agency) employee suggests that the funding is getting to the organizers by some means other than those which go directly through payment processors. It would be interesting if these measures were also actually ineffective. I was a bit skeptical of her claim that bitcoin ATMs in Ottawa were a likely source though:

https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2022/02/15/trying-to-follow-th...

Does that really matter though? The people whose bank accounts have been frozen won't automatically get their accounts back after 30 days, will they?

(And even if they do, 30 days is still a really long time not to have access to money, aside from whatever cash you happened to have on you at the time.)

It appears that accounts could have been frozen for as little as $20 according to the Finance Ministry, banks have apparently started unfreezing those accounts. Apparently the $20 freezes only happened rarely.

“Although not impossible that someone who gave $20 be captured and have their bank account frozen, I find that scenario…you know I think it would be in rare circumstances.”

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/banks-begin-unfreezing-accou...

It’s been explicitly stated that some of the financial measures will be made permanent. See Chrystia Freeland [0].

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ezralevant/status/149485205614596...

The thing she is referring to making permanent is making FINTRAC cover crowdsourcing and payment provider platforms. That seems like standard government regulation stuff.

At the end of the video that you linked, she explicitly says that some of the emergency powers (suspending insurance for commercial vehicles involved in blockades) should not be available to governments in ordinary times.

The FINTRAC inclusion of crowdsourcing is clearly a response to foreigners outside of Canada sending millions of dollars to fund an occupation of Canada's capital city. This is a delicate issue: on the one hand political contributions are a form of speech, on the other hand I don't think a country needs to tolerate foreign political extremists from rich countries dumping money into domestic anti-government movements bent on forcing the gov't to resign etc.

In my opinion it's quite a leap to go from what Chrystia Freeland said in that video to "permanent power to freeze, without trial or legal recourse, all the bank accounts and other assets of anyone it decides was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ in an ‘illegal protest.'". Of the 3 measures she mentioned it isn't even clear which ones are supposed to be brought up to be made permanent and "Sharing of information between law enforcing and financial services" doesn't even sound like it's about the "freezing" of accounts. Did I miss anything here?

I think there was something missed. The specific "tools" that Freeland is referencing ARE the powers to freeze those bank accounts. That IS the major tool that the government did not have.

I understand why Freeland would not want to outright say "we want the permanent power to freeze funds with no recourse" - but that's the only conclusion I could reach based on that clip.

Keep in mind, the government had the power to seize/freeze assets, before this Emergency Act, as long as they had a court order. However, that low bar seemed to be too high a hurdle so the Liberals want to make this permanent.

No, she was taking about extending money laundering laws to cover crowd sourcing and Bitcoin.

Isn't that plain abuse of a law for another cause? Or were the truckers laundering money?

The government already has these powers, but crowdfunding and cryptocurrency were missing. There's no good reason why we shouldn't include them in the existing laws.

There's no good reason that they couldn't have passed those measures on their own, without the power of freezing accounts with no due-process. This assuming that there are some "reasonable powers" they needed, which I don't agree with.

Further, the government always had the power to freeze the destination accounts as long as they were at a Canadian bank and had a court order. This is the only distinction.

FINTRAC is good

Ezra Levant is a polemicist who frequently misstates or fabricates evidence. You shouldn't trust him. He's essentially Canada's Tucker Carlson. He's trying to be provocative, not do journalism.

*Trucker Carlson!

And that would never be allowed by Canadian courts. Perpetual renewal would not satisfy the Oakes Test [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_1_of_the_Canadian_Char...

Like how the USA's PATRIOT Act was supposed to sunset after 3 years but has been extended every 3 years forever? Canada isn't the USA but it's not that different.

> I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.

Label any protest you don't like an "illegal protest". Then as long as there's less than one such protest every 30 days, it's not "permanent"... Yet it is.

Virtually all protests are "illegal". The problem is that the truckers figured out a way to make an illegal protest where the fines / jailtime is minimal compared to the effectiveness of the protest methodology.

Honking a horn carries very little penalty but is massively annoying if done in front of the PM's house. Parking your truck infront of a border crossing is similarly not very penalized, yet killing 25% of the trade between two countries is very damaging to the gov't.

The real reason we never saw these measures before is because of how brutally effective they are while being entirely non-violent.

This is very well put. The only acceptable protests seem to be those which are toothless. Somehow these people found an asymmetric cost situation and now the laws will be updated to take account of this edge case.

Not to mention that the protests were against vaccine measures to fight COVID while millions of people are dying from it. Context is important here.

In BC more people died of elevated levels of overdoses (eg. just what was above average) than COVID.

As of this post, 36,116 and not millions of people died of COVID in Canada, and the removal of vaccine mandates / mask mandates are inline with the recommendations of the Chief Public Health Officer. The people were pretty much protesting to get Trudeau to follow the medical recommendations of the Health Officer.

In most countries where masks and vaccine mandates have been eliminated, infections have gone down. Denmark's peak was the last day of restrictions.

Those countries already have > 90% vaccination rates, enough for the vaccines to be useful. They can get rid of their mandates because they statically are no longer necessary.

Yes, many of those countries have lower vaccination rates than Canada. 84% vs 81% in the case of Denmark. I wholeheartedly agree with you that our mandates are no longer necessary.

Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

20,000 people have died of overdoses in Canada since 2016. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

While that is a lot, it's far fewer from the number of people who have died from COVID.

It seems like you're over-dosing on misinformation.

People's right to protest should not depend on whether you (or governing politicians) find their cause sympathetic.

It's about whether there is a legitimate state of emergency. Therefore, the context of millions of people dying is relevant. But, you're right, their cause does seem rather counterproductive in this light.

>Is this actually true? According to [0] "The Declaration expires after 30 days unless an extension is confirmed within specific timelines by both the House of Commons and the Senate.". I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.

This is true. They have frozen the bank accounts of hundreds and you cannot do anything about it. You never got due process, there is no redress from the courts because you dont have a bank account to hire a lawyer.

What happens to people's mortgage payments? Alimony? Child support? Food for the week?

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