Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.

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 would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.

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 protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.

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.

Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?

They did replace the police chief, but we'd have also needed to replace the mayor and premier, both of which take more time.

Still sounds saner than what they actually did.

So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?

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.

> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com