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Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
Comfortably working remotely, like I was, right?
That might explain why you can't sympathize with people who lost their jobs or businesses due to COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates.
I also think the protest was over the top, but it pales in comparison to what COVID did to people.
I do not sympathise with people who refuse vaccination because I had to serve them when they were at their worst.