You're talking to one right now. So let's discuss.
My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest about and see how serious you take the matter.
But after people did notice you, and did listen, and after they've asked you to please stop your civil disobedience now and continue your protest within the laws, if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc. And if you still refuse after the treats, then it's normal for the government to follow through with it after all that, and force you to now obey the civil laws.
This I feel is true of all protests, may I agree or not with the protesters.
You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. We can't have people block the biggest commercial boarder between Canada and US all year long because they're protesting. Once the message has been heard, if people didn't care, it means you don't have support, and you kind of have to accept that. You can keep protesting normally hoping to slowly build more and more support, but you can't keep civil disobedience going on until you get support, because that's starting to get closer to coercion.
You describe protests as is they were an election campaign, with a well defined resolution mechanic and oriented to the public. they are not
the target audience of a protest is the people in power, they build on public opinion and wield it as a show against those in power.
also this can happen in many way, it could be a parent chaining themselves in front of town hall or an orderly march.
also a blockade does not sound like civil disobedience, in the face of these restriction civil disobedience would be not following the restrictions and opening anyway. (in civil disobedience you generally break only the laws you are protesting against)
You made a lot of hidden assumptions in both of your replies so it’s a bit hard to response. But let me try one: if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that? (I’m not saying that it is the case, more to question some of your assumptions in this situation)
> if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc.
More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
> if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that?
I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?
This doesn't really makes sense to me in a liberal democracy like Canada. Every few years, the citizen get to replace the government with another if they're unhappy with the current one. The opposition are able to have a vote to cast out the current prime minister if they want. The governor general, at any point, if it senses the people are no longer favorable to the government can kick off a new election as well. On top of that, the government is using force within the established limits of the laws and Charter of Rights of the country that are already pre-agreed upon, and the force it is using is itself in order to enforce the laws of the country from being broken, which is kind of its job as a government.
> More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
I'm not really following your point? The government is also allowed to enforce laws, and they can later be trialed. Police does this all the time, they will intervene and perform an arrest, and the trial in front of the court happens after. They are also free to enact the Emergency Act in the case of an Emergency as they did.
The funds from bank accounts are frozen, not taken. What will happen next is they will either be released, or a court case can start and decide what to do with the funds.
> I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?
I meant that they didn’t have the popular support to shut down the protest (I was not talking about the general popular support to the government as a whole, but just this specific issue). In the previous post, you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.
The specific methods used to shutdown the protest matter a lot. The police are free to arrest them or impound their vehicles. Freezing the bank account is not a standard course of actions, which you seems to think are similar to arresting. Even in the case of arresting, the police can’t even hold you for more than a few days unless they can find a prosecutor to file some charges against you.
They were free to use a plethora of methods to stop the protests, the complaint a lot of people have is they didn’t use other methods, and choose something that a lot of people consider immense overreach.
You are missing a key element of context in all of this. This protest took place "online" as much as in person. This was a giant photo op designed to generate propaganda to drum up support for a burgeoning handful of trumpist/brexit style political movements that largely propagate through social media platforms.
Exercising traditional forms of enforcement (as seen in almost every other protest in Canada in the past 20 years) would have resulted in the generation of sensationalist content that would have stoked a wildfire in the social media support for these movements. (Look at how much the network nodes of the movement pushed the single instance of violence - a horse that got spooked and trampled a protestor.) This is the reason why force was not used, and non violent/commercial methods were used instead.
> you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct
The was a poll and it showed that the majority did not support the protest, by a landslide. IIRC, 72% of responses selected "Protestors have made their point, it's time they went home" (paraphrasing), a minority supported continuation.
> You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever.
One of the reasons the right to protest is a fundamental one is because laws are made by people, for people, in the service of the public good and well-being of the citizens.
If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.
This is almost universally true, and you cannot make the argument of 'shutting down the right to protest' on the pretext of breaking a law, because protests are ultimately motivated on laws or policies being changed.Nobody protests forever.
> If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.
It's not the people's will as a whole though. It's a tiny minority of people that are protesting.
That's arguably true, though I'm also skeptical of any official numbers. The protests are not homogeneous at all: on one hand you have seemingly long convoys that are made up of small number of people, there are also very dense on-foot protests, it's somewhat hard to make an accurate estimation.
Still, making a statement doesn't require a majority.Usually if 0.5%-1% or more of the population starts protesting, the governing body responds, (or at least it should imo, having potentially more than 2-3% of the population actively involved in a political manner it's not a good sign: politicians don't want people too closely involved). This however vastly depends on the country, the culture, the people.Protests are also not accurate representations of the electorate.
I am not the person you were originally responding to, but I believe that this protest has been handled in a particularly poor way.
The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa.
By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to actually listen to them: Trudeau's government refused to speak with the protesters, and instead went into hiding until they could figure out how to use force to get these people to leave. If Trudeau had eaten crow and published his plan for lifting mandates, they may well have dispersed. What seemed to occur instead was that the LPC (in conjunction with the NDP and the CBC) used disinformation to circle the wagons and make excuses for a dramatic escalation in force, while refusing to publish a plan for the lifting of mandates. Contrast that with the BLM protests recently, where you saw a lot of dialogue between the government and the protesters and a relatively peaceful dispersal of the protest.
Make no mistake, "account freezes" are not a normal consequence of protest, even of violent riots. The Canadian government is also talking about similar things like revoking licenses, removing insurance, killing peoples' pets, and selling peoples' trucks and keeping the excess beyond what they need to cover fines. For all of these discussions, the Trudeau government is rightly being panned as tyrannical and dictatorial.
The "win condition" of civil disobedience is usually to get some imagery of the police or the government doing something really brutal in response to your protest. Trampling a Native American elder with a horse (and then lying about nobody being hurt and then lying about someone throwing a bike) and freezing normal peoples' bank accounts are pretty solid win conditions for this particular protest. By that standard, the Canadian truckers have been heard loud and clear around the world, and they don't need to keep it up, but they did need to stay until the government responded with violence.
Account freezes aren't a normal consequence of protest largely because multinational political fundraising isn't a normal part of protest. To the extent it becomes a normal part of protest, I would expect authorities to lean on the powers they have to freeze funds more often. Over the last 30-ish years there have been pretty aggressive moves to stop the flow of funds to wide categories of criminal organizations (some easier to define and more agreeable, others more diffuse and hard to pin down) and in Canada at least there has been broad support across the political spectrum for laws initiated by the Conservative Party to clamp down on political donations more generally. I would expect further laws for parapolitical interest groups engaging in political activity in the future.
None of this is something you have to accept -- and indeed people have been protesting against laws that freeze funds that go to charities that the state argues are connected to e.g. Islamic terrorism for decades now -- but I struggle severely with what I have to assume is feigned ignorance as to why freezing funds is a part of this protest and not others.
You can combine that with the fact that the shelter in question has limited capacity and euthanized 20% of animals in the last year. Roll a 6 sided die, and on a 6 your pet dies. That is absolutely a threat to kill pets.
Read to the bottom, where they specify that they have rated this as "false" because "The city did not threaten to kill any pets 'as punishment.'" The city merely said that they would give your pets to a shelter that kills 1/5 of the animals it takes in - a shelter that kills pets for "extreme fear" which could include separation anxiety from the pet's owner. They don't explicitly say that they are doing this to punish people because they don't say why they are doing it.
Also, make no mistake, nobody is going to outright say "I will kill your pets if you don't leave," but they are going to make threats like this that provide them with some plausible deniability to say "we didn't actually threaten to kill your pet, the shelter was just overwhelmed and couldn't take it."
I see no reference to any particular shelter in that tweet, nor do I see a citation to support a 20% kill rate.
EDIT:
Based on that source, the Humane Society had a kill rate of 20.6% in that year. Of those 10% were due to "due to serious behavioral issues such as aggression and/or extreme fear". So, a kill rate of 2.6% excluding health and/or owner request. That's not really a coin toss -- that's the Humane Society making a judgement call on whether a pet can be rehabilitated. I have no insight into the Humane Society's decision making here, but this number is clearly in the minority.
I don't think the government is being unreasonable here or threatening the wholesale slaughter of animals. They're asking people who have brought their pets to a protest to be responsible pet owners and find a safe place for their pets before the police move in, which is the same thing they wanted responsible parents to do with their children.
Let's assume we're talking about dogs here, unless people are bringing their really extraordinary cats to the protest. Anecdotally, in the GTA it can really hard to adopt a dog. One shelter I tried a couple of years ago didn't have a single dog. As a pet owner I would see the greater threat here that my dog would be taken from me and adopted out to a new family. In Ontario, euthanasia wouldn't be my first concern if I were to lose a dog.
I'm all for putting more transparency and reasonable bounds on the process formally, but I think you're missing two points:
1. While having formal bounds would be great, in this case, it hasn't been shown yet that they applied force unreasonably and beyond what those bounds should be. Some people want to believe they froze assets of innocent bystanders or small local donors, but that's just conjecture right now.
2. In your example, am I also blocking the biggest commercial boarder crossing between Canada and US? If so, I'm surprised you've not yet thrown tear gas at me, put me in handcuffs and physically forced me to move. And that instead you chose to simply freeze my bank accounts until I move.
I say that, because again, while I do like what the article points out, yes freezing assets is a big deal, and yes having bounds and guards and protections from abuse is important, I'm all for that. But my impression in this case is actually the government is trying to limit the blast radius and choose the lesser of two evils in order to force the convoys to stop blocking the boarder and major roads.
Instead of tear gas and physical force, which often impact a ton of innocent protesters that are legally and peacefully protesting, they went for a more targeted approach, where by blocking bank accounts you can be more specific exactly who you target, and it is also a more civil way to force you to move.
It should be noted that they did use physical force against the protesters to clear them from the street. That included teargas, pepper spray, batons, kneeing while prostrate on the ground with multiple officers present and no resistance from the protester, horses ridden through a peaceful crowd with at least two people knocked down and possibly injured including a women who appeared to be in her late 60s or 70s who required the use of a walker. There is video evidence of all of this if you care to look.
The response has been somewhat restrained compared to the antics that US police get up to but I would not call it a "civil way to force you to move".
The border crossing was unblocked without much fuss, and without the use of wild emergency powers. Several arrests were made. No "tear gas", wtf.
A Canadian MP has claimed that a small-donor constituent had their bank account frozen. In any case it sounds like despite their rhetoric (calling protestors and their supporters white supremacists and lawbreakers), the government wasn't going ham and using these broad powers on all of them. Good for them. Regardless, it's not encouraging -- the powers granted were very broad, weren't needed when granted, and obviously aren't needed now even though the government won't give them up.
And I'm not sure about how targeted the response has been. Aside from the rhetoric, peaceful protestors have been met with violence. Funds donated to support them have been blocked.
The fact that they are so angry at these truckers they are willing to give up due process in a court of law and think it is such a good thing the government can swoop in and freeze someone’s money. I think it is very dangerous and worry some unhinged person will lose it and go from protesting to attacking. I didn’t donate to these truckers and I never participated in any protests so suppose I don’t have to worry this time. I also like to point out that yes the truckers were breaking the law. This angers people so much. I always like to remind them breaking the law is actually an unsung right we have as Canadians. Yes we can go to jail but we are not put in a chair and tortured or killed or have our family rounded up and executed. And this is a good thing. It was only in the 1970s that Canada last locked up a man for life after his third offence for being gay. So thankfully people fought those laws and protested in the streets openly gay which was illegal. So personally I don’t know if I support these truckers but if they are willing to break the law and be arrested for what they believe in by defying an order to leave then I think it is great. I do not condone violence however and the few fringe protesters doing dumb things should be arrested and charged. But standing in the street refusing to leave that’s something we should be thankful we can do.
I think it's important that we draw a line in the sand about what is acceptable behaviour in society.
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
Would you have supported the US government applying the metrics for when protests should be shut down, and all financial supporters have their accounts frozen without due process. for the BLM protests in summer 2020?
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero
career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
It's not fake news, they did freeze some accounts, people are arguing which account was frozen, was it only that of people who illegally block major roads and boarder crossings as part of the tricker protest, and/or did they also include small donors to their funds, and/or only large donors, but then what is the threshold for small/large, and/or did they also include collateral of people who might have been peacefully protesting alongside the truckers illegally blocking roads and boarder crossings.
The article makes the point that it's is dangerous to not have some limitations on over reach in this case.
For example, in a protest, you might get physically tear gased or jailed, but it's temporary, and eventually you get due process and can be released, and your tears from tear gas will dissipate. Yet the nature of it is that police punishes you before you've been convinced in a court, so there's collateral damage, people who did nothing wrong are hit and tear gased and arrested by the police, and it's a big deal each time it happens.
Here too, there could very well be this sort of collateral, but the article worries that since it's less visible in nature, that people might not see it as a big deal, the same way that they would if they'd see police throwing tear gas, hitting people and arresting people left and right.
So it's saying, there's a possibility of overreach and collateral, but it might create less of a concern from citizens towards the government, since they won't notice the blast radius, as it is harder to notice it.
It's a good argument to some extent, even if in this case there would have been zero overreach and collateral, it is still a good argument for next time where there could be some.
I also feel logically, I don't see a motivate, small donors would only be cause for political complications. Logically it would make sense for them to restrict it to the people actually blocking roads with their trucks and to big donors financing large sums of money.
I think the article brings good points, but I also think it ignores something important, the alternatives...
You can agree or disagree as much as you want with the current situation, but at some point, there has to be ways for a society to enforce its laws.
Ideally you want to be in a society that define laws collaboratively, where you have a say in them, with a vote for example, and where the laws are applied fairly to everyone, without preferential treatment or specific targeting. And you'd want a process for people to asses and review if the law needs to be enforce in a particular case or not and what that looks like.
But you still need a way to enforce them somehow.
Ok, so let's say a group of people is indeed doing something that isn't right by the laws, and let's accept for arguments sake that you agree with that.
Now how do you enforce the laws on that case?
You could tear gas them, hit them with batons, point guns at them, handcuff them, and physically force them to comply, and lock them up if needed.
Or you can use softer methods, like temporarily freeze their accounts and funds, starving them of resource until they comply.
Yes, both methods are serious, they're meant to force you to follow the laws. So I agree that both are a big deal, but between the two, I think the latter is much better overall, and a lot more civil in my opinion.
Bob 1: We can’t actually find a record of [Milton] being a current employee here.
Bob 2: I looked into it more deeply, and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago, and no one ever told him about it. But, through some kind of glitch in the payroll department he still gets a paycheck.
Bob 1: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Boss: So, Milton has been let go?
Bob 1: Well, just a second there professor, we fixed the glitch. So he won’t be receiving a pay check anymore, so it’ll just work itself out naturally.
Bob 2: We always like to avoid confrontation whenever possible. The problem is solved from your end.
My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest about and see how serious you take the matter.
But after people did notice you, and did listen, and after they've asked you to please stop your civil disobedience now and continue your protest within the laws, if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc. And if you still refuse after the treats, then it's normal for the government to follow through with it after all that, and force you to now obey the civil laws.
This I feel is true of all protests, may I agree or not with the protesters.
You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. We can't have people block the biggest commercial boarder between Canada and US all year long because they're protesting. Once the message has been heard, if people didn't care, it means you don't have support, and you kind of have to accept that. You can keep protesting normally hoping to slowly build more and more support, but you can't keep civil disobedience going on until you get support, because that's starting to get closer to coercion.