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Comment by pylon | Hacker News Reader

>The police couldn't touch the protest for weeks not because of inaction but because your right to protest is a human right. They required the national emergency to remove our right to protest in order to label the protest illegal.

So you are saying under Canadian law, if you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads, destroying property, etc then Canadian police can't do anything? So if I go back in history and look at other protests in Canada like the ones against the pipelines for example, then I will see that the police didn't act against them?

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>you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads

Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.

>destroying property

What is the property that was destroyed by the protest in question?

> Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.

Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.

Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.

>constantly harassing

I see this word used multiple times in people arguing against the protest, never with any details about the concrete instances of the supposed harassment. Noise is not harassment, any activity with a large group of people is going to annoy and disturb the place they happen to choose to congregate, this is not even specific to protests.

Actually, just to be clear, what exactly did the protestors do besides blocking the road and making a lot of noise?

>protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most

(1) The duration of a protest and

(2) How much inconvenience it causes to the locals

are the two factors that determine whether it's a legitimate protest or not ?

Noise is 100% absolutely definitely harassment, especially when it is over 100dB within people's homes, and every hour of the day for weeks on end. Why do you say it's not? It was loud enough to cause permanent damage and was unending for a significant portion of the occupation, until a citizen managed to get a court injunction.

The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.

You mean they did this at night? Wow. And police let this go on for multiple nights? When sleep deprivation is done to alleged terrorists, Amnesty International calls it torture.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/sleep-deprivation-is-torture...

Yes. Exactly. They'd also put off fireworks at random hours of the night to add to it.

>Why do you say it's not?

Because it's not, harassment is usually implied to be personal, involving hostile contact between the harasser(s) and the harassed. Did the protestors shout insults or threats at you or other neighborhood residents ?

>all illegal under existing laws

Do we really need to constantly circle back to the point that protests have to be lawful ? they do not, protesting is about breaking the ordinary and disrupting the status quo, that's the point, especially when the people protesting feel cornered and without a lawful retort to perceived injustices.

Every action against the government will hurt the population to some degree or another, 100db noise seems pretty mild compared to the private property damage valued in the millions that large-scale protests usually cause. Prioritising comfort over protest is implicitely siding with the government, which is your right off course, as long as you're explicit about it.

Edit : 100db noise turns out to be a deadly serious matter, I apologize to the person I'm replying to for making light of it.

I still believe it's wrong to use this as justification for quashing a protest, there is a whole spectrum of solutions from reasoning with the protestors to wearing ear covers, but I can better understand and empathize with the antagonism most of the affected city's residents hold toward the protests.

> 100db noise seems pretty mild

I'm done arguing with you. Bye.

Here's a helpful chart:

https://whitecathearing.com/when-is-sound-dangerous

At 100dB, a safe dose is about 15 minutes. Blowing horns all day for weeks on end poses a significant risk of severe hearing loss. Per affected person, a hearing loss payout can be up to around $100k. Given the ~1M people in Ottawa, I would expect the physical damage to persons in the area to exceed the millions of dollars in your "[usual] large-scale protest."

I see, it was ignorant of me to dismiss that harm, edited my reply to reflect my understanding.

Thanks for the perspective.

So basically protests are OK as long as they are easy to ignore?

Let's flip it - can your neighbour block the end your driveway and lay on their car horn 24/7 for weeks straight if they say they're protesting the government? Bonus points for harassing you if you walk by

I wouldn't like it, but I also wouldn't call it an illegal protest because I don't like it.

Truth be told I've rarely encountered a protest I liked - they are always annoying (even the ones I agree with are annoying - they block traffic to friends and foes equally).

It comes with the territory, and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.

> and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.

It's not for 21 days straight at noise levels capable of permanent hearing damage. It's really not.

If the government had stopped at halting the horns, very few people would object, and even then not seriously. A lack of a horn does not prevent a protest.

But that's not what Canada did, is it? They not just remove the protest they froze bank accounts of supporters. That's not democracy. That's a government very very threatened by the protest.

If Canada does not wipe the slate clean and vote away every single politician who was culpable in this, then Canada is not the place it's been advertised to be.

I mean, aside from the noise torture they shut down a city's downtown core for 3 weeks, continually threatened, harassed, and assaulted it's residents, released multiple statements and videos calling for overthrowing and arresting elected leaders (especially women / people of colour), and the municipal police force proved itself incapable of enforcing the law and keeping Canadians safe. Not to mention the other blockades that halted more than $300mil/day in trade.

> So you are saying under Canadian law, if you protest and do something illegal like blocking roads

Every protest in history has “done something illegal” like blocking roads or disrupting access to public spaces, at an absolute minimum. So if you have the right to protest, then you have the right to do those things that would otherwise be illegal within the context of a protest, or you don’t have the right to protest at all.

Right so then let's continue the thought process. You are saying under Canadian laws, if a group of people are protesting, they can break whatever laws they want within the context of the protest and the police can't do anything? And if we look historically within Canada, we will see that this holds true? That the police never shut down any protest without emergency laws being enabled?

I’m not saying that at all.

I am saying that protest by its nature is supposed to be disruptive on some level, and laws prohibit the type of disruptive behaviour typical of a protest clearly don’t apply _if_ you have a right to protest.

Blocking roads and occupying public spaces are some of the most fundamental features of a protest, so if you have a right to protest, then you certainly have a right to do that within the context of a protest.

If a protestor decides to commit a crime during their protesting, like destroying property, arson, assault… then they should still have full criminal liability for that. Nobody is disagreeing with you on that point. To me it seems you are simply trying to invent some contention out of nothing, in order to fit your view that the entire protest itself is illegal.

I never claimed the entire protest is illegal. I'm just trying to question the notion that in Canada when you protest and despite how disruptive you are, the Canadian police can't touch you or stop you without invoking emergency laws. I haven't seen it in recent history so I wonder why it's the case now.

To be fair, no one is complaining that they protested illegally. The complaint is that the protesters actively targeted unrelated civilians and made life a living hell for them for weeks on end.

I don't think you would say that it would be ok for protesters to physically attack random civilians because "it's a protest and that's their protest strategy". There are obviously limits to the illegal behaviour generally allowed to protests.

Many people are complaining that they protested illegally. It’s the basis of using emergency powers.

> It is no longer a lawful protest against federal government policy. It is now an illegal occupation. It’s time for people to go home.

- Trudeau in his speech justifying the use of the Emergencies Act.

Again, people aren't complaining that they protested illegally, they are complaining that the protesters are physically and verbally harassing them beyond every reasonable degree.

The quote you brought out does not say that an illegal protest is the basis for using emergency powers. It says that an illegal occupation is the basis.

We have had many many "illegal" protests where streets have been blocked temporarily and there were no calls to break out the emergency act.

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