Hacker News Reader

Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

Patio11 has some good coverage of Trudeau's handling of the trucker protest against the government's handling of COVID-19 [1].

Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:

"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."

I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

(You'll have to Ctrl+F trucker as this blog doesn't seem to have <a name> for headings, as is customary on e.g. Wikipedia.)

View on HN

> […] ought to go through the laws and court system.

The Emergencies Act is part of the laws of Canada:

* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act

And there were court orders:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60356461

* 2022 ONSC 1001: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2022/2022onsc1001/2022... ; https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/docs/ISSUE...

And the court of law later determined that this was an abuse of power and unlawful. The fact that there is an existing law that can be abused does not negate the argument that abusing it is unlawful.

> And the court of law later determined […]

And an Act-mandated commission said it was warranted:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Emergency_Commiss...

On April 25, 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau selected Rouleau to be the commissioner of the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which had occurred in response to the 2022 Canada convoy protest.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rouleau

That is one step removed from Trudeau investigating himself, we're not talking the gold standard of systemic independence here.

Each political side loves laws like this until the other side gets in power.

That sounds a bit like "The police carefully investigated themselves and firmly established that no abuse or wrongdoing took place".

I've read this comment multiple times and now I'm greatly confused because it does not appear to be meant humorously.

At some point in history it was legal to own slaves ...

The law is a tool for the service of a community, not the other way around.

And in the Canadian system, are appointed commissions or judicial rulings supreme and overriding over the other?

In common law systems it is part of government review and is not meant to be a ruling on events already happened.

iirc the finding was that it was within the power of the province to handle the situation.

The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"

I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.

The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.

It may have been an emergency in the first days with the honking. That largely stopped after a week or so.

They switched to camping in front of the parliament with bouncy castles etc.

The bridge that was occupied in another province was cleared.

I'm really not under the impression that at the time they went in there was any emergency. It was ugly: Peaceful unarmed protesters in pedestrian zones with no trucks in sight were pushed back by squads with assault rifles and loud tear gas grenades. People with assault rifles stormed delivery vans.

The narrative at the time was that of a huge "far right" (what a surprise ...) conspiracy. No proof has ever emerged, it was just an abuse of power of the "left" who were at the peak of their power back then.

Good riddance, Trudeau.

yea if you ignore the public shitting, public pissing, drunkenness, the harassment of locals, then yea, it was only bouncy castles, or stuff like this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613957

I see a lot of posts like this, and this is straight up disinformation. I'm not assuming it's willful, since disinformation breeds disinformation, but here's my account as someone who lives here and is glad Trudeau resigned.

The idea that it was a few days of honking then bouncy castles is nonsense. It was an extended occupation of the downtown of the capital. Endless trucks and other vehicles, many with their wheels removed, back-to-back fully blocking a large section of the downtown for weeks. Yes, honking – and loud truck air horns.

There really was chaos downtown, and not the hand-wringing "poop in the street in SF" type. And a lot of it did have right wing vibes. Examples: A well known café had its large window with a LGBTQ illustration smashed. There was while when emergency workers needed escort downtown because of racist abuse. (I was downtown, I heard and saw a ton myself.) Just incredibly dumb stuff: A soup kitchen was intimidated and raided.

And yes, it was financially supported by the "right", including a lot of American money.

Yes, there was a site with bouncy castles and kids playing, but that's obviously not a problem. There's protest in Ottawa all the time, and it's sometimes inconvenient, and that's life in the capital.

The last straw for me wasn't even the chaos in Ottawa, but the protest shutting down the Ambassador bridge in Windsor. That's really bad. Ontario's auto sector is huge, and the perceived reliability and predictability of the flow of intermediate goods across the border is everything to that sector. Interrupting it has an enormous immediate and ongoing economic impact. (I'm not sure where you get your information, but the bridge is also in Ontario.)

None of that is to say that the emergencies act was the right tool. My fairly uninformed impression is that there were tools short of the act that should have been used.

But it's frustrating seeing disinformation and revisioning like this stand. Please reconsider whatever news sources are providing you with this false information.

You could also drive around the bridge ...

Why does everyone have to suffer at the hands of a few?

Overwhelmingly Canadian's wanted the vehicles removed - I recall no public empathy. If not, there would have been overwhelming public outcry and a follow up larger movement protest that would have called for no-confidence motion in that moment.

If you're going to talk about the law then words absolutely matter:

Abusing a law is not by itself unlawful. You always need to actually do something unlawful.

An abhorrent part, abused way out of its intended scope in a totalitarian way.

As one of Stalin's right hand men once said: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

I think it’s worth noting that the weekend before this, local residents of Ottawa had basically “stormed” one of the trucker convoy camps to unblock a road. There were genuine concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath. Not to mention the blockade in Alberta where they were found with guns and a pipe bomb, with their communications indicating they were planning to murder the RCMP officers on site!

Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).

I was a resident of downtown Ottawa during this period. It was bad. We had a young kid and didn't feel even safe walking her to a park, because the route crossed over convoy lines and there were all sorts of stories of harassment and assaults. We didn't even experience the worst of it; lots of people dealt with truck horns blaring 24/7, but at least our street at least was kept clear as an emergency route.

We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.

I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.

Its interesting how as of late the working-class's totally self-sabatoging ways of protesting almost universally piss off their fellow men and women, rather than taking their grievances to the powers that support them.

All of the protests I see lately, besides strikes, are college students. Which working class protests are you thinking of?

There's been massive popular protests in France, Germany and Great Britain in the past few years. Maybe in more countries? But they don't always get media coverage. One that you should have heard of is the yellow vest protests in France.

Im French, my anecdotal opinion is the same as the Canadian parent comment: they block and destroy, propose nothing realistic and end up pissing everyone off. I vote Macron as a result.

basic hotel strikes around SF are focused on bullying customers

Aren't that the only forms of protest that are allowed?

If I remember properly, offering the service for free (for instance in public transport) bear the risk of being held personally responsible of any damage or accident that would happen to anyone (which is not unlikely if you factor in provocations)

no one cares about how the food arrives to their plate, only that it's there.

Stories of harassment and assaults? Provide one source for any assault.

Glad you asked.

* Pushing a reporter live on air: https://x.com/mylenecrete/status/1494874304814751744

* Beating a counter-protestor on camera: https://x.com/timabray/status/1488231660260839430?t=Bx4fGVxR...

* Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=23006638534070...

* Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag: https://imgur.com/a/80bmPQ8

* Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building: https://x.com/gray_mackenzie/status/1492705868697198593

* Encouraging harassment of the lawyer leading the class action lawsuit against them: https://www.facebook.com/groups/217129079397701/permalink/62...

* Threatening public officials: https://www.ottawapolice.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=7...

* Spamming emergency services so they could not be used: https://x.com/OttawaPolice/status/1491788988654383115

* Harassing children at an elementary school: https://pressprogress.ca/elementary-school-students-and-teac...

* Bomb threats against a children's hospital: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/cheo-targeted-by-bomb-threat-monda...

* Pelting ambulances with rocks: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...

These are just the things that were recorded, reported on, and archived with the links functioning three years later. Scroll up and you can read about what many of us saw in person. And yes, there's more where that came from. But it's much better to read from people who live in Ottawa and want to share their experiences: https://www.opc-cpo.ca/

Thanks for the list! I can say that three of the stories I was referring to above are the ones listed as "Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work", "Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag" and "Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building".

The first and second happened only a couple blocks away from us, and we frequented both businesses, so it was infuriating to see them and their employers attacked like that. We lived in an apartment building so the third one was pretty alarming.

Thanks for the evidence.

Most of these are from the mainstream media. How about the truckers side of the story for each incident? For all you know it could be staged.

Not sure which town got the prominent coverage, but here in America a lot of the coverage we saw looked like a peaceful presence, organized to allow emergency passage, and frequently we saw what looked like a fair - lots of families strolling through, eating food, adults and kids dancing, buying random things from vendors. We saw interviews with drivers who told their stories and said they were there to peacefully protest, as was their right. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that the actions by Trudeau seemed so disproportionate.

On what? Fox News? Because that wasn’t at all how it was portrayed by Klepper who actually took the time to be onsite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmiKG56zuw

Here's [0] a muuuuch more balanced overview of the situation, the day after the ambassador bridge was opened.

[0] https://youtu.be/f7YIpSWqT0s?si=0DdPECPkBcU1AKKj

The convoy was largely funded by right wing American groups, so it’s not surprising they received favourable media coverage.

A lot of the family-friendly stuff was specifically for the cameras. A few things I can speak to:

* It definitely wasn't peaceful -- activists and Ottawa residents documented numerous incidents of violence, harassment, threats, vandalism, and so on in Ottawa. This document compiles some of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...

* Organizers encouraged participants to bring more children when it became clear police action was imminent, presumably to complicate law enforcement efforts. A Facebook post even suggested adding bouncy castles to "contribute to the fun" during these escalations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/freedom-conv...

* In the case of Ambassador Bridge, some reportedly put their children in front of the police. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/convoy-protests-total-ar...

* There’s academic discussion suggesting that children and family-friendly elements were intentionally brought in for PR and to slow the police response. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cag.12909?af=R

* Despite claims of peaceful protest, there were reports of ambulances being blocked or even pelted with rocks. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...

* This is without getting into the hate speech. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B...

I live in Ottawa. We were failed by all levels of government, our police services, and our intelligence services.

The convoy drove across the country, broadcasting their intentions on social media. Yet, everyone acted shocked when they did exactly what they said they were going to do.

I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau, but they were completely disrespectful to other citizens, and I could never defend their actions. However, irrespective of how unpopular their actions were, the courts have deemed the federal government's response unreasonable and unconstitutional, and I agree with that assessment.

The government could have dealt with this earlier and more directly, but whatever passes for "leadership" these days in Canada has proven itself completely inept.

Personally, I would like to see an inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, but I guess that’s not considered a pressing issue anymore.

> I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit

The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.

Perhaps bad phrasing, it is an emotional issue having lived through it.

I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things. This includes the right to express dissent against other citizens to whom we have delegated certain decision-making responsibilities. A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.

At the time, I think we were also in stage 2 lockdown(which should have been enough to stop it), so the people bearing the brunt of these actions, whatever you want to label it as, were not the ones making those decisions. Our elected officials don't live inside Parliament Hill.

> I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things

That is what a protest is. The collective agrees, not their rulers.

> A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.

I don't agree here, and even if that were so, there's a stark difference between the original intention and the ultimate use of permission as a tool.

I don't agree with your last point. In a democracy, we have elections at a cadence. If you disagree with protest permits, you are welcome to stand up in the next election, or vote for a representative who will.

We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.

I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.

> A permit isn't about seeking permission

Then they need to be renamed.

In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; therefore, I don’t need permission, which is discretionary.

Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.

A permit is literally about seeking permission to do something from an authority - the absence of which, makes the activity illegal.

>I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King

Canada is ruled by the British king/queen, even if only symbolically.

>A permit isn't about seeking permission

A permit is permission in granted form. Perhaps you meant something else, it's a poor choice of words.

The monarch of Canada is the King of Canada. It's a completely separate role from the King of the UK even though it's the same person. Canada isn't ruled by the British King.

You don't need a permit to protest in Ottawa, on foot, unamplified in a location where you do not block others. You do need a permit to block the streets with your protest. Those are readily and regularly granted -- if the city didn't grant them the courts will force them to. Once you get that permit, you'll get a police escort to block the street for you.

I took part in one political protest in my life. The leaders spent most of their efforts screaming at us “stay out of the road and don’t block the sidewalk!”

We were encouraged to bring our kids, and criticized by the opposition for doing so. Our kids had a great time and learned the value political participation.

The protest was 100% successful at it achieving its one, narrow aim.

Except they weren’t protesting or inconveniencing the government or the oligarchs, just their fellow citizens.

Which seems to have inconvenienced the government enough they had an outsized reaction, yes?

>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside

What exactly would you do if you were a trucker? i.e your livelihood has been denied for a long time?

>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau

I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".

There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".

Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.

The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.

When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.

At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.

>There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".

There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.

If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).

>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.

It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.

>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.

Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?

>and none of what the protesters did mattered.

We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.

>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted

Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.

I don’t know why they couldn’t do the friggen obvious move of asking the police to unblock the roads by force, and impounding the vehicles for repeat offences. Going after bank accounts was a coward move that never made sense. If I just sat down in the middle of a subway tunnel, I would be removed by force immediately, no matter what I was protesting. They created problems for themselves by not doing the obvious solution.

Blocking a road is a fire hazard and should never have been tolerated by local police for that reason alone. You cannot impede transit in a city.

If only more people A) asked this question and B) looked into what was (not) happening.

Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".

> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.

https://thewalrus.ca/freedom-convoy-the-prince/

> Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc

Maybe the correct move was to resign if it got that bad.

I agree, the police should've resigned if they failed to do their job. Call in the military.

That's basically what happened.

The police chief? He did.

The city or the province could have done that. They didn't. The Feds could only use federal reasons.

The mishandled response to the trucker protest should be blamed on the city and the province, not on Trudeau.

There is room for two failures. The province should have enforced the provincial law, and the feds should not have have taken action through the banking sector.

But this leads to the question if the province is not doing it's job, what do you do as the feds?

Not saying they did right, but curious.

My preference would be that the fed enforce the laws on the books themselves (if they have the power to do so), or pressure the province to do so (using the democratic leverage available).

> what do you do as the feds?

I don't know exactly how Federalism works in Canada but the answer is their jobs. If that doesn't entail stepping in to provincial business, they shouldn't do anything.

There doesn't always have to be something done.

Provinces are absolutely responsible, policing is all on them.

Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the truckers, period.

Trudeau was the one who triggered the protests in the first place.

The liberal, moral, fast and peaceful solution to the trucker protests was simple: stop forcing people to take experimental drugs against their will. The vaccines didn't reduce transmission, and there is no rule against living life in a risky way (even if you believe the vaccines worked at all), so there was never any moral argument for the mandates. The truckers were right to protest, as Trudeau and the Canadian people were doing them a severe injustice.

[flagged]

I'm an Ontario resident.

Every single vaccine or gathering mandate I experienced was either provincial (Conservatives) or municipal (also conservative for Toronto and georgetown where I live).that they barked up the completely wrong tree is the breathtakingly depressing stupidity behind the whole thing.

Don't believe me? Alberta Conservatives did not have same policies. Then they begged BC and Saskatchewan for ICU beds but that's besides the point - provinces and municipalities had freedom to enact different policies.

Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything. That's obviously by design and part of the demarcation of powers we expect from a democracy. The accusations of authoritarianism would have been just as drastic (I think?) if the PM had stood up and tried to call the RCMP or Ottawa police / OPP to task for their inaction and so on.

Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.

> Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything.

Wut?

The RCMP reports to Parliament up through the Public Safety minister. The bucks stops with the PM.

The federal government has not only the right but the obligation to hold the RCMP accountable.

But that's not what I was arguing? Holding accountable is not the same as telling them what to do in terms of enforcement action.

This was actually discussed as a specific controversy at the time the convoy was undergoing. Trudeau getting on the phone with chief of police and asking him to clear the protest would be a serious breach of political standards in our democracy.

Also the police in question here are the Ottawa Police Service, not the RCMP, I believe.

Your phrasing is "do not have the power". Trudeau most certainly does have the power.

And I'd disagree about breeching political standards. The police are an executive function and report to the PM. I'd like to think Canadians know that.

RCMP in Ottawa would enforce federal laws not provincial. Seems to me you are talking about OPP responsibilities.

It was something like the Ottawa police said they were unable to and Ford said it was a local issue or not a priority. He was onboard with emergency act as it helped with Windsor too.

This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151

You're over an order of magnitude off. Over 200 people were debunked. A donation of just $20 could result in someone being debanked: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/even-small-donation-t...

The show of power - that even a democratic government will target your families - is far worse than the relatively small number of people it hit.

Not around in the 00s when the US federal government leaned on banks and payment processors as a way of debanking pornography businesses?

Or - rather recently - when the German government stormed people's apartments for calling politicians idiots.

If I'm reading this thread correctly, it sounds like truckers staged a protest in Canada blockading roads. The government couldn't move the trucks because the cops sympathized with the protestors. So the government debanked the truckers as well as anyone caught donating more than $20 to them. Damn.

It takes half a day to get the details over with a judge and decide exactly whose and what accounts to lock, those truckers were allowed to stay there for months. (And if you don't know what exactly to block, you shouldn't be allowed to block anything. Maybe you still have enough reason to look at their movement, maybe not.)

Also, it takes a couple of hours to get the police to unblock a road. Last time I checked, money movement in bank accounts does not block roads.

So the threat of violence against a non violent protest resulted in the non violent protestors being labeled terrorist and justified all the action that followed?

95dB air-horn for 16 to 20 hours per day is not non-violent.

How close do you have to be for it to be 95dB?

A quick search shows 120dB at 1m isn't abnormal for a truck air horn. A line of them from far enough away will decrease in level by 3dB per doubling of distance. 8 doublings would make it ~96dB at 256m.

>Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did.

Where on earth does this stat come from?

It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Opinion_pollin...

Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here. The first of which is linked to a group called "Maru Group", whose website is dysfunctional. They are owned by Stagwell Marketing, whose CEO, Mark Penn, is directly linked to the US and Canadian Government, and more specifically to companies which were directly hurt by the trucking protest. Maru Group's sampling is tiny, they asked only 1500 people and they give no information on how they gathered this data.

Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.

That scares me about the quality of wikipedia stats on other subjects.

That's really great work, thanks -- could you share a link to the 50% polls? This is probably worth porting back to the Wikipedia page to set the record straight.

>Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here.

That has historically been their explicit policy in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_terti...).

I don't know, but I live in the NCR, and few I know thought it was right.

The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.

I'm sure people directly affected agree with you, but it's been downhill for this regime since the trucker protest. We are literally still talking about it, right now.

I cannot comprehend how it could be overwhelmingly supported.

To be honest, I can't shake the suspicion that a fair share of the talking is not homegrown.

> Facebook stated that they had removed fake users that were set up in overseas content farms, in Romania, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, which were promoting the convoy protests in Canada. (https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-congress-asks-facebook-role-2258...)

> An Economist/YouGov poll conducted from February 12 to 15 found that 80% of Americans had heard of the convoy protests. [...] Among Republicans, 71 per cent supported the convoy protests, compared to 18 per cent of Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Opinion_...)

When you consider how much attention the convoy got in America, and how sympathies fell on such partisan grounds, it gets more concerning. Suddenly, Canadian politics is a hunting ground for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, online bot mobs... I think you see where I’m going.

It’s difficult to approach these discussions and not feel like bad-faith actors are artificially making a bugbear out of it. This is especially true when many of the loudest defenders of the convoy weren’t even there, aren't even Canadian, and -- three years later -- may not even be people.

That said, I can agree the Emergencies Act probably shouldn't have been used here, and I have question marks about freezing people's bank accounts -- but this is really a conversation actual Canadians should be owning, since it concerns us most directly.

As a Canadian I haven't heard about the trucker protest since they happened. It was bizarre seeing it come up as the top discussion point in this thread and seems like a big mismatch between American and Canadian perception of what's going on.

It's absolutely astounding that there have not been harsher consequences for the police who abandoned their duty in Ottawa. Where is the of rule of law here?

The Police Chief lost his job over it. What other consequences would you think appropriate?

Investigations and penalties for everyone up the chain, starting with the frontline officers who were on the ground refusing to issue tickets. If an officer chooses to not do their job over their political beliefs they do not belong on the force.

“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”

Same applies here. If 10 officers misbehave, it is easy to fire them all, as you suggest.

If a majority of the entire police force defects, your only choice is between limiting the scope of the punishment to a few ringleaders vs. basically disbanding the police force and starting a new one from scratch, hoping that you can even recruit enough people to do so; but, in the meantime, the city won't be policed anymore, as the entire institutional memory has been purged.

In most similar cases in history, the authorities opted for a blanket pardon, as it is much less of a headache.

It is not even a new problem. Police is a relatively recent institution, but armies, gendarmes, legions etc. rebelled all the time, and peace usually had to be bought by concessions.

Absolutely. I'm a paramedic. I will be in front of a licensing hearing defending why should be allowed to continue as a paramedic to the DOH if I refuse to treat a patient because of politics/beliefs, as an EMS provider.

Depending on the severity, I can even be facing administrative charges of patient abandonment under my state's Administrative Code for standards of care for providers.

Loss of support for elected officials?

People don’t seem to understand that the government rules based on enough popular support.

When the police start siding with protestors that’s a government problem, not police problem.

The protest did not have popular support amongst the general population. If police support a fringe movement that's an everybody problem.

Look at it by age, it was highest by the youngest age group (61% had sympathy for the protest in the 18-35 age range) - the working age.

I don't think it was overwhelmingly popular - nor was it overwhelmingly unpopular. It was both in certain groups.

I agree a police response or similar was sensible for the situations you mentioned, but they didn't rise to the level of national emergency.

> concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath

Similar concerns happened when Harper and Ottawa mayor at the time denied the rights and freedoms of protestors of the G20.

It's concerning how the "true north, strong, and free" is losing that last part.

Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition. In fact it did that twice in 50 years. And only twenty people getting their rights completely stripped because they bothered the federal government workers in Ottawa is good enough according to you?

Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.

Please don't cross into the flamewar style on HN. This comment is only dipping a toe in that direction, but still—it's the opposite direction to what we're trying for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616298.

Are you talking about the militant separatists who had already committed mailbombings and escalated to assasinating a government official and kidnapping a foreign diplomat on Canadian soil in 1970?

It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.

> Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition.

As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).

> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.

Wat?

* https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...

There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.

Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:

> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;

* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/page-1.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act

"In 1971, official date of the birth of topos theory, unfortunately the dream team at Dalhousie was dispersed. What happened, that made you go to Denmark ?

Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.

That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.

(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)

Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;

several political activists from various groups across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.

I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.

The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.

Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.

My contract was not renewed"

https://www.mat.uc.pt/~picado/lawvere/interview.pdf

I love Bill Lawvere, but he punched the president of his university in the face, he was genuinely lucky to find a position in academia afterwards.

Amazingly there is someone living very close to the airport where they found the body of the Deputy Premier of Quebec (Pierre Laporte) in 1970 that flies the flags of allegiance to the successors of the terrorists (i.e. the MNLQ following from the FLQ) from a pole in his yard for everyone on the highway to see.

For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.

The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.

The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.

And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.

The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.

Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.

  We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't.

That's literally what a democracy is and has been.. It will always seem great until you are the minority.

America had human slaves built into its democracy until the majority said otherwise. Unsure why this is so shocking.

But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.

A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).

I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:

>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.

I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?

America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.

The federal response was largely due to the abject failure of the city & provincial governments to enforce their laws. The city and province had plenty of tools to get rid of the protesters: noise bylaws, parking bylaws, et cetera. They failed completely, so the Federal government was forced to intervene. The federal government did not have nuanced tools to deal with the truckers so used the blunt hammers they did have.

That's basically what happened. Between the three police forces, the jurisdiction was unclear. Parliamentary police and city police could not decide which laws to enforce as it depended on where the protestors were located. The province mostly polices highways and small townships that cannot afford their own police force. They quickly regained control of the highways to divert any additional incoming trucks but couldn't step in within city limits for trucks that were already there.

YSK that the people who had their accounts frozen weren't simply protesting in Ottawa; they were blocking international borders to our largest trading partner, effectively holding our economy hostage. This absolutely constitutes behavior that's a danger to our nation so it makes sense to freeze the accounts of the people doing it. To be clear, there were many attempts to settle this without freezing people's bank accounts, but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.

That logic seems like it would outlaw labor strikes too, especially in important industries. Sometimes, holding the economy hostage is the point.

I take exception to the framing of “attempts to settle this.” The government used violence and threat of violence to make the problem go away. There wasn’t an attempt at compromise. Do what I say or else isn’t an attempt to settle.

Except it wasn't a labour strike.

That's how analogies are supposed to work. How do you expect civil society to function if people only supported civil disobedience when it's their preferred cause?

The recent postal strikes in Canada are an example of the situation you're describing. Eventually the federal government had to step in and break the strike to get the mail system moving again - if the workers refused to comply, against the orders of the government, I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.

>I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.

Typically such measures are mandated by court order, not executive fiat.

The government should be able to force people to work under worse conditions and less pay they want to? That’s ok if most Canadians support it? Really? I hope you can appreciate just how dangerous this sounds, even if you think my slippery slope has a lot of traction on it.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about labor strikes? If customs, border control, longshoremen, or some other union decided to strike and picket would you support having the feds declare them terrorists and doing the banking thing?

If they blocked travel arteries like highways and bridges for more than a hour or two.

> effectively holding our economy hostage

This is what a protest is. (French here). If protesters go as far, and in Canada it was because you did them dirty, then you must sit at a table and negotiate. You must sit at a table and negotiate with everyone in a country. You cannot do someone dirty then complain that they protest.

It’s effects removing the right to protest, and therefore, removing democracy itself. Go live in Singapore?

> This is what a protest is.

They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).

If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.

Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.

Not a Canadian, but no, a protest protests and gives voice to the disagreement. Blocking other people's rights is not just a protest and is likely to trigger action to protect others. That's how it goes everywhere that has rights. Normally, some effort is made to do it peacefully, but there are no countries where you can halt the economy whenever you want to force people to negotiate with you.

A protest which isn't allowed to do anything other than raise voices is a powerless and toothless protest.

I don't agree. There were a bunch of university protests over Gaza (slapped down for stupid reasons by university administrators under pressure from government), and, really, they just made noise, but they got a lot of people to notice, including myself. And to ask ourselves, what do I think about this?

If you are expecting protests to force someone's hand, that isn't protest or protected political speech, that's coercion. Some forms of that are legal (e.g., strikes), but there are pretty sharply defined limits.

That's a good point, but the Gaza protesters would of course counter that they were slapped down (for stupid reasons) and the war in Gaza (which is illegal and genocidal, though initially provoked by Hamas) continues to be supported. So their protest, while not useless, wasn't effective in bringing change.

Preferably online, but not on a website that everyone sees. Something silent. On the side. Also please have the dignity to die in peace, not commit suicide in a place where everyone can see it.

so you were okay with BLM blocking freeways, and city roads?

What are you going to say if the answer is yes?

I respect principled people a lot more than people who flip flop out of self interest even if I might agree with the latter some of the time.

If you are okay with the Truckers doing the same, then nothing.

Did this ever happen for more than a day?

I mean, this is the French way. SNCF striking (a yearly occurrence) is arguably halting the economy each time it happens.

As a sympathizer to the HK protests, I've heard all these talking points before -- that the protesters are ruining the economy and making things miserable for everyone. Usually the protests can really only get so big when there is a shared grievance that keeps getting ignored by the administration.

In the case of HK, the grievance was the possibility for criminals to be extradited to Chinese mainland.

In the case of convoy protests, the grievance was the vaccine mandate in order to work a trucking job that's mostly solitary with minimal human contact.

I think a better comparison would be the jan 6 protests in usa in 2021.

Speaking as someone who has been in dozens of protests in my life: yes, that is what protest is, and as a protester engaging in civil disobedience you expect the response from authorities. That is exactly the point. When I have been on the receiving end of tear gas, there was no surprise. Big duh.

Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.

They weren't punished by the law though, they were debanked in an era where you need to use the banks to eat, pay rent and to merely survive. That is above and beyond any legal punishment. It is economic banishment and it is se excessive that it alone should be shunned by any person who wants civilization to survive.

Please, disagreeing on a topic and providing arguments is one thing, but suggesting somebody go live in another country because you don’t agree with them on something that happened in their country is disrespectful.

I mean, the South in the US waged a really big protest because they wanted slaves, and we murdered each other enough that they sort of changed their mind. Not every political grievance is on the right side of history.

> the right side of history.

A particularly odious moral framework, mostly used to justify mass murder.

Everyone thinks they're on the right side of history :)

I guess it's time for slavery again, then.

Stop Oil glue themselves to the road in cities as a protest, disrupting the economic output of major cities. They haven't been treated like a terrorist organisation.

By your logic they should be.

Actually the Harper gov't passed laws when in power that enabled them to treat such protests against fossil fuels as terrorist or threat-to-national-security events.

And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...

I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.

>but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.

Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.

> Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.

Nobody went after anyone's family.

If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.

People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.

Or the ones in Coutts with guns and a pipe bomb.

Yeah are we forgetting Alberta truckers who were planning to murder RCMP officers, and were straight-up terrorists?

The thing they were found not guilty of? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/anthony-olienick-chri...

> But Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were both convicted on other charges of mischief and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. Olienick was also convicted of possessing a pipe bomb.

> "It was an overcharge to begin with," Beyak said.

> He said if police tried to storm the barricade, he would "slit their throats."

So a few of them had guns then?

I don't know about the details of this prosecution, but having served on juries, it is important to remember than "not guilty" is a finding that the government didn't meet the burden of proof, not necessarily a finding of actual innocence. That article would certainly suggest that they were prepared for violence, even if acquitted on the most serious charge.

It certainly is a finding of innocence when the presumption is innocent until proven guilty.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.

This seems like a pretty big conclusion to reach based on one article and one topic, no? Especially when you, in the same sentence, also recognize that you don't follow Canadian politics?

Debanking someone in our current society is the most abusive things they could have done. It prevented people from accessing and using their own money in an era that is almost cashless. It effectively starved people out and left them trapped. It is so excessively overboard, yet there are those here who will defend it because it happened to those not on their side. When the government changes and it is used against them they will shout and holler with surprise. I'll never understand how people don't see how something that you allow the government to do to others will eventually be used against you too. It's only happened every goddamn time throughout history.

Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.

docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Fragment/Te...

your link: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

> Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.

Find this extremely annoying, especially in search results: I want to start at the beginning of the article/post, and not some random place in the middle—which is where the highlighted snippet in the search results are from, but not helpful for learning the larger context.

It also tends to mess up URLS that you may want to copy-paste as it has that text parameter garbage at the end (often with a sizeable amount of text that needs to be removed).

Agreed. I'm in the minority I'm sure, but I think this is an anti-feature. In addition to your good points, it's also very fragile as a small change in the text of the page can break the link. It also leads to monstrous URLs that are quite hard to read for people who don't know about this feature.

It's a great way to link to the source of a verbatim quote, though. It goes straight to the relevant context, and breaks only if the source of the quote itself is somehow changed, making the new inconsistency clear.

Wow. Came here expecting to read about truckers and instead learned something really useful! Thank you!

I've seen it used countless times before, but I thought it was something somehow being injected into the page by a search engine (especially when it comes from custom site searches on forums), rather than a browser feature.

Gentlemen you can't discuss web protocols tips on here, this is a tech forum!

Wow, TIL. Looks like a fairly recent feature, though (at least in certain browsers).

I don’t follow Canadian politics, and I don’t know that much about Trudeau, but having the capital full of honking, mad truckers, holding the government hostage for their demands to be met in a time of crisis sounds like an absolute nightmare.

There had already been one standoff between local residents and truckers, I remember there being chatter that the next weekend groups were going to coordinate in their neighborhoods and drive out the convoy on their own (using baseball bats, cast iron skillets, or golf clubs if need be). The situation had the potential to turn into an absolute blood bath.

In the US some psychopath straight up shot and killed a climate activist who was in the way of his car. It’s a miracle something similar didn’t happen there.

In the US? I recall an event in Panama. Quickly googling shows the person was a dual US citizen? Maybe that is what you are thinking of?

OP is probably conflating the environmentalist protestor shot in the US by cops and the numerous racial justice protestors killed by motorists, along with the incident you mentioned. Easy mistake to make.

I don't remember a protestor shot by cops in the US? Searching, I see something happened in Atlanta?

And I remember a few motorist incidents, but numerous? Certainly more than I would prefer.

You’re right.

If someone tried this protest in the US someone would have been shot night one.

Do we think it might be a little intellectually dishonest to equate a peaceful political protest with an armed hostage-taker?

I think this is important regardless of whether you believe in their specific target of protest or not. The right to peacefully protest is very very important, and your feelings on a specific protest should be wholly divorced from the importance of preserving the right to protest in general.

Nobody was held hostage. People unhappy with their rulers took peacefully to the streets and made noise and peacefully and temporarily interfered with some business activity.

This is the furthest thing from “holding the government hostage”. It’s the adversarial relationship between the populace and the state working exactly as intended and designed.

Armed hostage-taker? It’s unfortunate you feel the need to misrepresent my position rather than address the real issue.

This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.

It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.

For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.

“holding [whatever] hostage” means an armed attacker and threat to life. It’s no misrepresentation, you were using exaggerated and hyperbolic terms to describe a peaceful protest.

Nobody’s safety was jeopardized. Some disruption is the point of a protest; you can’t operate the building during a sit-in, for example.

“protest in a way that doesn’t affect anything and allows society to ignore you” is not a legitimate or constructive type of feedback.

>'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #&$#ed up has happened."

Wait, are people that shocked that their democratic governments are wiling to act like mobsters/dictators against a minority group just to get their way and appease a majority, when the history books are full of such examples? People must have a short memory then and why history repeating itself is a fact.

I live in Ottawa and lived here during the convoy. Happy to answer any questions as an actual resident from anyone about my experience.

How bad were the covid restrictions in Canada that the truckers were complaining about in 2022? By 2022 most of the world had gone back to normal business-as-usual. Why were they even protesting? As an outsider looking in, it seemed like a mix of ignorance, propaganda, and stupidity made them do it.

Without looking up the specifics, by the time of the convoy, the vast majority of covid restrictions were gone. They liked to complain about vaccine passports, which Canada had, but by 2022 the vaccine passports were gone everywhere except the US border, by the request of the US government. So, from the outside, these guys were protesting and occupying Ottawa over actions of the US government. On the other hand, these guys don't really like being talked down to no matter what the elites say the real problem is. It started as a protest against vaccine passports but really turned into a ragefest against the establishment.

It's important to note that some of the key people who were behind these protests were not truckers, but were involved in earlier attempts at mass protest in Ottawa as part of the 'yellow vests' group from 2019

This isn't true. At the time the US required proof of vaccination at the border too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us-vaccine-mandate-frei...

This was implemented in October 2021 and wasn't removed AFAIK until May of 2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions? They can't, that's how. Again, it's stupidity, ignorance, and probably some propaganda/misinformation that spurred them on.

"How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions?:"

They can protest (which they did) and Justin Trudeau could have picked up the phone and call Biden and ask to remove the restriction, which at that time of the pandemic was completely useless. Instead, Justin Trudeau played politics, he figured it was much better for him to divide the population on the issue than actually work with its biggest trade partner to remove the restriction.

Thing is that Canada already had the mandate delayed once by request to the US prior to it coming into effect, I believe it was 6 months delayed already.

The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.

Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.

The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)

The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.

What were the general public's opinion of the protests?

Also how 'dangerous' was the convoy perceived to be?

Were the actions of the Government deemed to be overreach?

As a Canadian I can say that most people I know have opinions about the protests and the government's response, but that whole affair is about 1,000th on the list of grievances we have with our current federal government.

It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.

The protests lasted quite a long time and I think the public's opinion on it changed over time.

At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event

After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!

There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.

I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.

Thanks for replying. As a non-Canadian, your response has been more informative than the weeks I spent reading Twitter trying to figure out what was happening.

What is your opinion of Kraft Dinner?

Is KD unhealthy slop or delicious, and how do you feel about adding hot dogs or other toppings?

Now we're getting into the real meat of the questions. I love Kraft Dinner, in a somewhat ironic way. The best way to eat it is to add hot dog slices while cooking the pasta, then top it with ketchup. You can also have it with hot dogs and beans on the side (as my dad would call it, "beans and wieners and Kraft Dinner") It sounds disgusting, but its comfort food. Not sure if I would like it if I hadn't grown up eating it.

It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.

Interesting, had no idea they didn't do the KD in QC. Now this is a divide I did not think we had between the two solitudes.

It actually is disgusting, but you and I know it's that good kind of disgusting.

Now ... ketchup on KD... this i cannot let stand

I'll quote my own comment on the trucker situation from a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37450666

> It's a story of everyone going way too far.

> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+

> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.

> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.

> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.

> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)

> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.

> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.

You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?

It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)

Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.

I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...

Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.

I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.

That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?

Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.

The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.

What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.

Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.

I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.

And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.

People on hn seem weirdly obsessed with trudeau's handling of the trucker protest. Regardless of what you think of it, at this point it is very old news and trudeau's actions were controversial but largely popular.

The handling of the trucker protest is not why he resigned. It is not why he is unpopular.

I’ve noticed a ton of non-Canadians like to reference this event as if it’s some incredible example of government tyranny gone too far. Nearly anyone who lived in Ottawa during this time (like me) would say the police completely failed the city, and the “protests” went on for literal weeks too long due to inaction and incompetence by all levels of government.

I live and work with mostly conservatives and none of them supported the truckers nor do they even mention it. Their grievances are more typical - inflation, taxes, and immigration.

I think we need to be careful when reading these opinions to not mix up Americans’ views, Russian trolls with legitimate Canadian discourse.

Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics. Heck the moderators refused to allow any criticism of the monarchy when the queen died but allowed it when Jimmy Carter died.

> Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics.

Not necessarily always far-right, but almost obsessively anti-establishment.

Criticizing someone during their funeral is in pretty poor taste regardless of your political leanings.

They refused any criticism of the institution itself in addition to the person. But for carter criticism of him and his politics were fair game.

See, you were not supposed to say the quiet part out loud

This is not top of mind for Canadians at this time. Anyone who still thinks about the trucker protests is already not voting liberal or NDP.

While I agree with patio11's assessment here, if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them.

Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.

> minorly-inconvenienced

120dB train horns at 2AM in the morning in a residential area is not a minor inconvenience.

> a residential area

Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.

Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.

Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.

South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.

Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.

You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.

Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.

I know several people who live in those "non-residential" areas you describe.

For example, https://www.google.com/maps/place/9+Rideau+St,+Ottawa,+ON+K1... is a condo building.

Singular counter-examples are meaningless in reference to the category "residential".

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.

"several people" is not singular

> Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

World-renowned pianist Angela Hewitt would disagree:

* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/angela-hewitt-play...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Hewitt

Her living room, with her piano, is in the area.

Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.

It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.

Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.

That stopped after the judge gave an injunction. That judge also said the protest could otherwise continue as was a Charter right.

> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them

This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.

I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.

The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.

There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.

Switzerland has direct democracy and seems to go fine with it.

its a much less severe response than there would gave been, compared to say, ottawabs torching the trucks along with anyone in them

> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them

The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.

Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)

Spend 5 minutes in Toronto Union Station during commuter hours and you'll never describe Canadians as polite again.

That's the very worst point of view you'll ever get of Canadians. Of course people in a busy train station during rush hour aren't in the best mood.

Travel the country up and down, big cities and small towns, and I guarantee you will conclude that Canadians are the best people around.

Yes and no.

1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.

And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.

Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.

I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.

Daily traffic at Union is 300k according to a quick google.

So the most annoyed 1% of Canadians go through there every day.

Not the world’s most rigorous basis for a sweeping statement about an entire culture.

They are also not all Canadian in the station

French Canadians are not a welcoming people.

I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.

I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.

It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.

As a French Canadian this is unfortunately true the further north you go.

There are still Canadians in Canada?

ethnic canadians are still about 5% of the population, if you can believe it.

so that's the thing right

people who are geniuses at one thing may be completely out of their depth in other areas

I think this is sadly a demonstration of one of those

> Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system.

Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.

It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)

It shows.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics

> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point

> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone

Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?

I have to say, as a Canadian, I kind of miss it when nobody outside of here cared what happened up here?

Now it's all "You should be a 51st state" and "Oh your Trudeau is a COMMUNIST and needs to GO!"

It's not as if Canadians are any more reserved about their nth-hand opinions about Trump. Speaking as a Canadian here.

I mean, are we really nth-handed? The sad thing about, as they say "Sleeping with the Elephant" is you get first hand experience of the elephant's ... movements ... even if they never notice yours.

Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns

"I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone."

- Wow, for no reason you're glad to see him gone?

As somebody who lived in Ottawa at the time, this was not good coverage. Neither was DHH's. It was incredibly rage-inducing to read in real time as it was happening too. My takeaway from this is that one should minimize the confidence in one's opinion of foreign events.

This seems a bit confused.

Canada is not the US. Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?

i.e. When there is Parliamentary sovereignty/supremacy?

An inferior authority can never legally overrule a superior authority by definition.

> Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?

Then there is an external guarantor of the rights of the people against the government.

You mean the same external guarantor of the rights who gets picked by the same government?

Huh? What ‘external guarantor’?

> What ‘external guarantor’?

…the coëqual judiciary.

How can a subordinate entity be external?

A subordinate judiciary isn’t coëqual.

Well, I'm disappointed in Patio11 now. I sort of looked-up at him.

Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?

Niche view? Nobody likes Trudeau, not even is own party that is why they are pressuring him to step down. The comment you are commenting on might not be well thought out or in depth but it is how MANY average Canadians feel.

Trudeau is like the Obama of Canada. His only redeeming quality is that he has now resigned.

I, for 1 sec, thought you said press Crtl F to pay respects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com