Canada being totalitarian? I'm shocked.
The real problem is oligopoly, not fascism or anything like that.
The government puts most of its effort into protecting friendly companies and industries from competition and even funneling taxpayer money to them.
In the case of Bell & Rogers this is billions of $ a year.
These two details are important because:
1) no laws were passed and no courts were involved.
2) activities that were perfectly legal at the time, were deemed retroactively illegal and persecuted (not prosecuted - no courts, remember?).
The only regimes in which you see this are tinpot dictatorships and Trudeau's Canada.
Just imagine how powerful those two precedents are for any future radical who seeks to follow on the footsteps of the petite tyrant Trudeau.
In both Canada and the US each "side" loves ratcheting up government power against what they perceive as their political enemies. It's going to end in tears.
That just means the conservatives can never be allowed to win elections...to protect Democracy!
That's what happens when there is change in the world. Conservatives resist change, but change often has a momentum of it's own.
The world has changed a lot recently. TV brought everyone together. Transportation made the world smaller place. The internet and social networks gave everyone a voice. These are all game changers. For better and worse. We can't un-invent all that stuff.
The reason older people tend to be conservative is that they are used to the way things were when they grew up. They don't like the changes. They want the good old days back.
Young people don't have these notions about the good old days, they weren't around. They started off with a different view of things. The Overton Window moves with them. Progress ratchets, as you said.
p.s. None of this implies that I endorse how the protests were handled. I'm all for democracy and 100% against authoritarians - whether they are communists or fascists or whatever else.
Recently we've seen a functional alliance of those on the bottom half of the diagram.
People complain about left-leaning protests taking over a public park - these guys took over multiple public spaces in multiple parts of the city. About a square mile in the middle of the city.
Exactly when did the left leaning protestors have their bank accounts frozen? Exactly when did the left leaning protests get broken up.
All I remember is canadas stupid government supporting the left leaning protests.
In the states I remember fancy Nancy wearing an African shawl kneeling in the capital.
This sort of stuff is too obvious not to see. Good luck.
It was left leaning and Police were quite happy to handle it with all they got. Many hundreds or thounsands of protester everyday (or nights) for over 100 days. 17 years-old students being hit with Baton, pepper spray, , tears gas, rubber bullets, flashbang etc. It was so chaotic that vladimir fucking putin even call canada to sort its shit (!!!). Since then police really has dialed it back in the protest.
I wonder why the ruling class hasn’t opposed social mousetrap identity politics protests.
It really was eye opening in many ways. The media sucking up to the gouverment, the gourverment not giving shit about what end up being a large chuck of the population, forgetting they were in a democracy. Trucker were err. Well see for yourself.
>There must be an urgent, critical and temporary situation that “seriously endangers” the lives, health and safety of Canadians, and it must be so significant as to exceed the capacity or authority of the provinces to address it.
A foreign funded group with heavy vehicles invaded and took over downtown Ottawa and international border crossings. The province wasn't interested in dispersing them.
The Emergencies Act definition wouldn't allow you to halt a coup attempt if Ontario could handle it but chose not to. At a certain point you have to analyze things and say that if the law has a massive loophole then the law was poorly drafted.
“You can’t protest, there’s a government here!” - Ottawa residents
Case in point: look what happened in Israel when the Abraham Accords were signed, Hamas decided to go for the "nuclear" option.
It is 100% inconvenience, and if there’s one thing that can not be tolerated in these times, is any sort of inconvenience.
Well that's kind of the point - protesters don't have the power to change anything based on physical inconvenience. The inconvenience is merely a PR effort because protesters don't have any more effective form of of PR - if people are famous/wealthy/powerful/etc. they have better forms of PR available.
The problem with some styles of protest is that they're asymmetrical in terms of damage. A relatively small number of people who get worked up enough can congregate in one location and indefinitely shut down the operations of a person/group/organization/government. At some point the legitimate governing body needs to enforce the functioning of society, or they'll lose the mandate to govern.
The rail protests had international implications too
So if that wasn't enough to invoke the emergency act then it's hard for me to imagine why the Truckers were
Possibly because the truckers blocked a bridge to the US, and the US didn't like that.
But the emergencies act? Freezing bank accounts?
They didn't blow up the bridge did they?
- the private banks decided to close the accounts, ostensibly acting by themselves (but probably not) and not by government order
Stuff even two years ago is lost to history
There is also a world of difference between an organized protest with a specific purpose drawing awareness to a cause and thousands of people using commercial vehicles to hold a city hostage with no purpose or agenda other than a bunch of angry people unleashing their rage on the cities populous.
- If you worked from an office, you likely spent a good chunk of the first 12-24 months of Covid working from home. After that, it was up to your employer to put into place a policy about that.
- Addendum: if you were in the federal government, you *were* required to get an initial shot plus a booster for most parts of the federal government. Failure to do so was dealt with in a few ways depending on department, but would usually result in your being placed on unpaid leave (PSAC has made it very difficult to fire someone in general, including under these circumstances).
- If you worked in the Forces, I gather you really didn't have much of a say in the matter, but militaries worldwide have strict and extensive vaccine schedules for all enlisted staff (and often officers, too).
The bodily autonomy argument holds some water, sure, to the same extent as you have the choice not to vaccinate your kid as they start going to school (but don't be surprised if they can't go, because we as a society have decided that things like polio don't deserve a repeat performance).
You were at no point prohibited from leaving the country, though you could de facto end up so because other countries likely wouldn't allow you in, at least, not without a Covid test.
If you were a Canadian citizen, you could not be legally denied entry into Canada, though because of the circumstances you may have been, at different points, required to either undergo a test or to go through a quarantine period.
These people were protesting being denied the ability to pick and choose what they do in society while unilaterally picking and choosing how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.
Frankly, this is probably best showcased by them deciding to just decide to take over the Ottawa baseball stadium (which is in a suburb and next to a highway) and use it and a few other places around downtown to store propane, gas, and other heating fluids since they decided to do this in the winter.
They were, at best, hypocrites, and massively reckless in the face of what was at the time still relatively speaking a medical unknown.
I'll also add, Re: the use of the Emergencies Act: regardless of what I think, a federal court has ruled it unconstitutional; the government has expressed interest in appealing the decision. I don't have a legal background, so I don't have a useful comment to add here.
I will say that it came after several weeks of multiple levels of police (but most notably, OPS) failing to do anything about the protests while tensions escalated, so it didn't come out of nowhere, and it wasn't the first thing the government tried.
Even at the time, despite very strong claims from on high to the contrary, it was becoming more and more clear that the only people who might benefit from the shots were those taking them (and the people selling them of course).
It’s surprising to me to still see people making the "social good" argument in 2024.
Boosters were required as frequently as they were because Covid was developing new variants faster than things we're used to (like the flu, which tends to have about one variant a year with high infection rates among humans). Naturally, many people do get flu "booster" shots annually to try and reduce the spread of what's still a deadly disease to the immunocompromised; we just don't talk about it much because flu death rates have roughly stabilized for long enough that they're not considered excessive deaths (in the actuarial sense).
Yes. Who said otherwise?
> and is an effective way of reducing the spread of viruses at scale, sometimes significantly so.
I don't follow. Doesn't herd immunity mean the herd is immune? As in, there is no transmission and the pathogen either dies or fades to the background?
Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
The strongest point in favor of the "social good" argument is that the shots reduced severity of infection, thereby reducing hospitalizations and freeing up hospital beds for random accidents. But the overflowing hospitals issue wasnt nearly as bad as it was made out to be as I understand it. And we'll probably never know for sure how many hospitalizations were caused by the shots themselves, because only lunatics think that something with vaccine in the name can harm you.
In a perfect world where everyone gets vaccinated and vaccines are 100% effective in all people against all individuals of a strain, yeah, probably. In reality, not everyone gets vaccinated, and not everyone reacts well to the vaccine, and sometimes individuals from a strain slip by, so no. Some individuals from a strain will survive, some people will catch it and get sick, and of those surviving the sickness, they'll become the breeding ground for a new mutation.
> Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
Source? The latest data shows that out of ~40 million Canadians, about 4.8 million or about 12% are reported to have tested positive for Covid at any point and been recorded as such. Globally, the figure is about 775 million out of 8 billion[0].
Among vaccinated Canadians, CCDR 2024 Vol. 50 published by the PHAC[1] shows that both despite waning immunity from the vaccines (which is partially attributable to the poor understanding of what would both be safe for humans and long-term effective against Covid) as well as the emergence of new variants both causing spikes in overall case count and associated stats (like hospital admissions and deaths), vaccinated people were measurably less likely to contract the disease and to fall severely ill if they did. This is roughly in line with your comment about vaccines reducing infection severity.
The study is a relatively quick read and I encourage you to give it a look if you have the stomach for medical statistics (which admittedly is pretty dry). The methodology is nothing special, but not problematic IMO, and the sample size and population distribution are good for a study of this scale (though there's an overrepresentation of the unvaccinated relative to the Canadian population; in this case, it likely doesn't represent an issue).
[0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases?n=c
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/canada-communicable-disease-report-ccdr/monthly-issue/2024-50/issue-1-2-january-february-2024/covid-19-outcome-trends-vaccination-status-canada.html> By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity.
Doing the math, that estimates ~70% of US blood donors over 16 had contracted actual covid by almost 2 years ago.
(https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7222a3.htm)
Are blood donors representative? I don't know. Reported and recorded positives doesn't seem at all representative of an overall infection count though, since it misses probably most minor cases of covid, which makes up most cases period.
This final cohort was studied based on records generated and collected in four three-month periods between April 2021 and September 2022 which is a good timeline.
This study seems to focus on the efficacy of older (≥65 years) people sticking to a strict vaccination schedule, which is reflected in the numbers; in that age group, vaccination-linked immunity is highest. The counterpoint to that is that younger groups aren't sticking to as strict a vaccination schedule, though best as I can tell, the study stops short of spelling that out, so that's my own conclusion.
Do you have any evidence at all of that? AFAIK, none exist.
What exists is some weak evidence the vaccine severely reduced the transmission of the virus. I've never seen any study strong enough to be proof, but then this is extremely hard to measure (either way it goes).
As regards your world of difference argument. Most of the important protests that have changed anything have involved not simple, passive attemtps to "draw awareness to a cause", but actually causing a good deal of deliberate loss of income, convenience, security and comfort. (see the suffragettes, the stonewall riots, the montgomery alabama lunch counter boycotts, chartists in 1848 etc).
The truckers, whether you agreed with them or not, were peaceful and intent on using that peaceful protest to force a change in their society. They were met with co-ordinated media defamation, the invocation of a power which should only be used in war time and the seizing of their supporters funds. Pretty much standard behavior for a Western democracy getting squeezed and needing to ditch the facade of democracy and revert to good old fashioned authoritarianism. It's never far from the surface.
1. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/csis-told-government-... 2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-rcmp-convoy-violence-1...
Then things get super messy when you start to look at how the province deals with indigenous populations, their protests, versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
The fact the emergency powers were used, to me, are a symptom of a broken system.
Either way, opposing political powers are jumping all over the opportunity to leverage the situation for their own gain.
I'm so sick of politics. They are all dishonest. No matter what, we lose.
No.
> versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
Also no, not white nationalists.
I have a feeling hardly any Canadians at all know what really happened in Ottawa even though there was and is extensive live video evidence streamed and stored on YouTube.
I have friends who live downtown Ottawa. I know exactly what went on. I know what flags were on display.
People need to stop down playing what happened.
Federal government workers generally live in Kanata and Orleans. Some work downtown, but generally it is a lot of private sector.
Do you have any proof of this or are you just being libelous?
> attempting to overthrow the Government.
If honking horns is enough to overthrow a government then the government is way to weak to exist.
Are there any actual examples of people making claims about going deaf due to the protests?
Doctors == generally low information value unless they have training in science or mathematics.
If you have some evidence that it’s safe to listen to sound levels above 90dB for extended periods of time, I’d recommend you publish it.
A woman took legal action against the protestors. In her action she called on an ENT. The ENT make the statements I outlined above under oath.
Search for it if you actually care. Again, I'm not wasting my time because nothing is ever good enough for the people who align ideologically with the convoy. The dismissiveness, what aboutisms, and misdirection that follow are never worth the effort.
Yet you imply that others should do exactly that in order to take seriously your insinuation that actual bodily harm was incurred. If you have proof that someone was physically damaged by the blowing of the truck horns then it will a simple thing for you supply this information of which you have implied you are the possessor.
If you do not have it and have never had it then you could also help by just stating that, so that no one wastes their time.
Just putting this into context:
> Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a committee of MPs that up to 210 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the financial measures contained in the Emergencies Act.
> She also said the fact that more than 200 bank accounts were frozen did not necessarily mean that more than 200 people lost access to their funds. Jacques said that individuals may have held more than one account affected by the measures.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
We see this in the job growth numbers, for example, that show massive federal government hiring and anemic private sector growth. A market solution would have federal incentives create private sector growth to accomplish goals.
And, yes: Canada badly needs some kind of antitrust regime. Perhaps the reward for monopolization of a Canadian market should be nationalization.
Somehow, the people rushing to use that "faccism" label tend to ignore this one property of the original ones.
The change in Canada from 20 years ago is just shocking. If you can't see this, it is because you don't want to see it.
Canadians like you are why I think your country is utterly doomed.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/let-yourself-be-monitored-e...
Putin aspires to be a totalitarian leader but even he has not managed to pull it off. He depends quite heavily on a depoliticized "silent majority" of Russians who are too scared/complacent to challenge his security apparatus. If Russia were a totalitarian state then you'd see that majority rushing to join the military and join the government.
Either you forgot about COVID or you seem to have a case of Stockholm syndrom.e
Those which haven't had an issue with mandates shots seem to totally ignore what a schock the sitaution was for those who didnt approve.
Consider the similar backlash to mask mandates. I didn't like wearing a mask, but it's not a huge imposition. Some people treated it like it was greatest injustice they'd ever experienced though. And then they went on to rationalize this emotional reaction by making up shit about masks cutting off their oxygen supply or causing brain damage, etc. All this despite the fact that wearing a mask (or even a respirator) is necessary for a big chunk of the day in many jobs ranging from construction workers to surgeons.
Canada is not totalitarian. Frankly, I can't imagine claiming so unless you have quite an extreme view of politics (for instance, the appropriateness of blockading downtown Ottawa). There is plenty of MAGA-like conspiratory thinking in Canada, but it's relatively new for Canada, and definitely not widely-accepted.
There's no shortage of Americans who wholeheartedly believe that Canada is an authoritarian regime. Given that the average HN user seems to be an older, conservative-leaning American I'm not really surprised by the sentiment, though I did hope for more level-headed discussions.
It also doesn't help that the same government has admitted to a current genocide without basically doing anything about it. So yes, when you combine those two things criticism will happen.
At no point in the last several decades has any Canadian government come close to being totalitarian, authoritarian, or otherwise. The most recent example in living memory (which I don't intend to downplay) would've been residential schools, which were run by churches with supportive policies coming from the federal (and lower) governments. The last residential school closed in 1997.
Canada is absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt, a representative democracy falling under the broad umbrella of "Western (Neo)liberal democracies". There are legitimate criticisms of neoliberalism just as there are of neoconservativism, but totalitarian aspirations are exceptionally rarely a valid accusation.
If anything, the biggest threat to Canadian democracy might be a decline in political literacy. We don't have an election where we vote for PMs, but many people still do. We don't have a two-party system; in practice, we have a multi-party system to the extent that minority governments are possible (we have one now!), but many people vote as though we're in a two-party system with a handful of "joke parties" that amount to wasting your vote. We have a bicameral parliament, but one of our chambers is made up purely of elected members who have so far mostly stayed level-headed through more or less sheer force of good will (which I don't consider a good enough protection in the long term, but that's another topic).
How laws are introduced into parliament and passed is something most Canadians probably couldn't answer off the top of their heads in more detail than saying that there there are a few readings, and most of us aren't following what our MP or MPP is doing for your riding, because in real terms, most of us vote based on a party leader and their at-large actions in office.