And this is another factor in why the EA was needed. Under what normal law could we tell people that an entire defined geographical area is a no-go zone, where they can be subject to arrest if they do not have a legitimate reason to be there?
See For Example, the video here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/walkaway/comments/sxbg6w/ottawa_police_wont_let_woman_go_grab_a_coffee/
Sorry, when did I say on February 14 that the recently cleared out Windsor protest wasn’t cleared out? Huh?
Here’s a timeline of major events around the invoking of the Act, courtesy CBC:
Yeah, those pre-February 14 developments do not read to me, and they apparently didn’t seem to most Canadians, including RickJay at the time, like reliable progress in keeping a very major and volatile emergency situation under control.
Again, I am by no means claiming that the Emergencies Act had to be invoked or that there were no possible preferable alternative strategies. I just think that in the aftermath it’s comparatively easy to act as though some vaguely specified partial alternative strategies were obviously the successful solution making the Act completely unnecessary. Yeah, the total reality of what happened is probably a bit more complicated than that.
More goalpost shifting. What you said on February 14 was that “There’s going to be serious violence unless something is done” and “I’d be 100% behind the government of Ontario forcing something but Ford’s a coward too”. No, that certainly doesn’t sound as though you thought at the time the protest situation was being successfully resolved. Which is the point I was making.
You are confusing two different issues; you pulled a quote referring to Ottawa. The comment I was responding to, which you latched onto here, was Dr. Paprika’s asking about Windsor:
[quote=“Kimstu, post:617, topic:959186”]
On Feb 14 I didn’t think they were ending IN OTTAWA, as you very plainly quoted. Dr Paprika was not asking about Ottawa at all.
True. Maybe you were in fact feeling serene and confident about the resolution of the Windsor situation at the same time as you were getting (like most Canadians, and very understandably) increasingly anxious and frustrated about the apparently intractable escalation of the Ottawa situation, as of February 14. You didn’t happen to mention that at the time, though.
I’m sorry I didn’t keep you updated on my thoughts on all the many less concerning things going on the country that I didn’t mention in my comments that were clearly entirely specific to the blockade in Ottawa, but will be sure to be clearer in the future.
No problem, you had more important things to worry about. Which, again, is kind of my point: you’re now up on your high horse, so to speak, about the government’s allegedly “disgusting” abuse of power in invoking the Emergencies Act. But at the time, you certainly didn’t seem (and you still don’t seem, other than one vague reference to some unspecified level of “sending in the cops with horses and riot gear”) to have any better plan to suggest.
Not that I mind people scolding the government for possibly unnecessary actions that may have infringed civil liberties, of course: it’s better to overreact to that sort of thing than underreact, after all.
I just think that declaring with the benefit of hindsight that such actions were obviously unnecessary and disgustingly high-handed and what-not tends to involve a fair bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking.
I was following all this on the ottawa reddit megathread, and by that point, a whole lot of people were taking that as proof that the Ottawa cops, at least, were largely on the side of the convoyers. Every day we kept hearing, “Citizens don’t need to act, we’ve got it all under control, we’ve increased fines and this time they’re really going to feel it!”, only to see nothing actually happen. To see cops brush off citizen complaints with “There’s nothing we can do”. To see at least some cops going out of their way to do the exact opposite of what they’d just said they were going to do (like stopping the flow of fuel and other supplies to the convoyers).
I cannot emphasize enough how badly trust in the police and the rule of law was eroded in Ottawa those first two weeks.
Hell, at one point, I was getting ready to go down there and Do Something. If a couple of the more sensible city councilors had backed a plan for regular citizens to start doing the job the police refused to do, I would have gone down there to do something.
And that’s a fucking crisis. I recognize that even as I acknowledge I might have ended up in the middle of the crisis.
I am not convinced passing the Act was outrageous, but the $50 million bill for security and to reimburse business is. And the estimated losses due to blockading of the Ambassador Bridge are also eyebrow raising.
(The amount based on time passed is the outrageous part, not the reimbursement which I know little about.)
If I was wrong about the Windsor timing, it still lasted until after Ontario called a state of emergency. Unsure what additional powers that put into play.
There are. of course, class action lawsuits already raring to go, but I doubt all that can realistically be recovered. I don’t think Tamara Lich has hundreds of millions of dollars.
At some point, it’s not about actually getting paid, it’s about sending a message. If anyone else wants to pull this shit, they’d better be serious enough that they’re willing to risk torpedoing their entire life over it.
Far too many of these guys seemed to think it was a lark, even as they were being manipulated by people who were just using them, with no regard to the damage they were doing.
More stupidity - DND flooded with phone calls demanding Canadian Forces protect Ottawa protesters from police | Ottawa Citizen
Essentially, convinced that at best the police forces in Ottawa were being oppressive and, at worst, foreign UN police of some sort, hundreds of calls were made to Canadian Armed Forces numbers asking that the military rescue the protesters from the police.
Now apparently they think if enough of them petition the GG she has to dissolve parliament:
Spoiler alert: That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
Andrew Coyne has a great column out today about how all this is the result of a war against knowledge.
Makes sense.
Lies are easier to weaponize than the truth.
Time once again for this quote from Isaac Asimov:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ”
Meanwhile, at Dunder-Mifflin headquarters…
There’s an inherent asymmetry here. There’s only one way to tell the truth, but there’s an infinite number of ways to lie.
And you see the effect of that in this convoy. Get any ten of them together and ask why they were there to protest, and you’ll get eleven different answers. There’s so many different lies out there, it’s a pretty good bet that at least one will appeal to any one particular fantasy-prone individual. Get enough of those people together, and you’ve got yourself a convoy! Yee-Haw!
Poor old truth never had a chance.
I was going to ask if anyone had seen trucks from one of the US versions of the Freedom Convoy headed to DC. My wife just sent me a picture from Kentucky of an armada of trucks heading east. They think it’s one of the trucker convoys.
How exactly can you tell?
I see “armadas” of trucks everyday on the interstate. There’s just a whole lotta trucks.
Did they have any sort of signifiers?