Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorgesborges | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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.

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!

FINTRAC is good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com