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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

It’s sort of scary how authoritarian Canada has become in recent years. From compelled speech, gun confiscation, to financially alienating political dissenters to now possibly trying to force companies to participate in things they don’t want to.

What’s going on up there?

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Very few countries have the historical, legal, and cultural background that favors freedom (in many senses of the word) over authoritarianism as the US. Maybe Switzerland is another example.

See Australia for another Commonwealth country that has been passing pretty dystopian laws around privacy and encryption.

It looks like the anglosphere or Western world, however you want to frame it, seems to be moving in many troubling directions. It's hard to separate oneself from their moment in time and history and particular vantage point but it does seem we have a growing number of citizens willing (or apathetic enough) to sacrifice a whole bunch of liberty for some promises of security.

> financially alienating political dissenters

That's a fancy way to say racist truckers throwing a weeks-long tantrum were made to pay for their actions.

> racist truckers

Come now, really? Cooler heads[0,1] disagree with that assessment of the trucker protests.

[0]: https://www.thefp.com/p/what-the-truckers-want

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/stop-calling-truckers-racist-many-b...

>were made to pay for their actions

...which were being handed out without due process. Everyone is afforded due process - murderers, rapists, and yes even racists.

Exactly, this was the scary part for me. First time I've ever seen a public emotional frenzy escalate to a point where the majority agreed to suspend due process, for things that could have been prosecuted normally

I'd say that the suspension of due process started long before those protests began, back when the various levels of government started imposing forced lockdowns, forced masking, forced injections, travel bans, and curfews, among the other violations of the most fundamental of rights and liberties.

We should also keep in mind that the majority of citizens were not in favour of such actions. If the Canadian public had widely supported such measures, then they would have been self-imposed, and just voluntarily happened. The governments wouldn't have had to resort to mandates and other forceful methods like they did.

We have nothing of value up here and have decided that economic success is something we don't want to strive for anymore (not that we ever did).

Exactly what you think is happening.

Your list is woefully short.

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