They were re-writing it as it happened (see below), so not unfair at all.
This dichotomy was in full view all the way along. When you were someone they agreed with, the convoyers were all sweetness and light, hugs and dancing and hot tubs. But if you weren’t part of their tribe? Threats of violence and rape, intimidation, honking, train horns, you name it.
Guess which parts the convoyers pointed all their cameras at?
And I saw this live, here in Ottawa, as even people I know personally were, “Hey, they’ve got a hot tub, how bad could it really be?” That damn hot tub and bouncy castle were the best propaganda move I’ve ever seen.
And this was the real emergency. There was no way this gang of idiots were ever going to actually succeed at any of their aims. The worst they could do was maybe injure or kill a few people before utterly failing.
The real emergency was the utter failure of every level of government and police to actually do their damn jobs. It’s that failure which could have caused the most damage to our society. I don’t know if the EA was the only way Trudeau could have fixed the problem, but I haven’t really heard any other real suggestions for how it could have been fixed. Every other proposed solution seems to be, “Well, what if the police didn’t screw up absolutely everything? Then it would have been fine!”
And this is highlighted by this fact:
Known in some circles as “The Battle of Billings’ Bridge”. The single most effect anti-convoy action until the last two days when the (non-Ottawa) police finally acted was entirely conceived by and implemented by a self-organizing group of local citizens, who used publicly available convoy information and local knowledge of their area to completely bottle up a large number of vehicles and people, and force at least some concessions out of them. You know, vigilante action.
Which we shouldn’t ever need in Canada. The real emergency was that we did need it.
A lot of this was brought up during the hearings, and at least some of it was debunked. I haven’t watched all of it, but many of the claims the government made to justify the EA were bullshit. The ‘Terror’ stuff was unsourced and the gov admitted they got it from a media story, not first hand intel. The Coutts blockade was cleared before the emergency act was invoked, but used as an excuse to invoke the EA. The heads of OPP and RCMP denied that they asked for the Emergency act which the government originally ised for its justification, and said that they had the tools they needed without the act.
My take on it was that the government wanted the act invoked for their own reasons. When the Truckers rolled into Ottawa they wanted a meeting with Trudeau. Instead, Trudeau did an interview where he called them racists, misogynists, and other names, then he buggered off and let them stew. I honestly think he was hoping to provoke violence that would justify a crackdown and imposition of essentially martial law. When the truckers remained peaceful, he went ahead and invoked the EA anyway.
The EA was not used to clear the streets. They didn’t need it for that. The EA was used to punish people by freezing bank accounts, arresting them, etc. The Ottawa police chief even said that just ending the convoy and going home wasn’t going to prevent them from ‘hunting you down’. They extended that threat to people who did nothing more than donate to GiveSendGo. If you recall, Freeland also declared that they were going to make a bunch of the EA measures permanent.
I don’t buy the financial arguments. Canada has seen numerous times where protestors shut down or delayed critical infrastructure. We have had environmental terrorist acts like train derailments, we’ve had blockades before by native groups and other activists. We just went through a spate of Catholic church burnings.
Compare the Trucker protest to the Quebec student protests of 2011-2012:
In 2011 Quebec faced massive protests from students angry at tuition increases. The protests spread to other workers and to rabble rousers in general, who engaged in all kinds of serious civil disobediance including the blocking of freeways with concrete blocks by protestors.The Champlain bridge was blocked. There was plenty of violence, and riots broke out, The Education Minister’s pffice was vandalized and painted red. In one riot in Montreal 69 people were arrested for violent acts including throwing Molotov cocktails. A related riot in Victoriaville resulted in ten injuries, including injuries to police officers.
Here’s some examples:
These riots and protests went on for a year, and no one even considered invoking the EA. Bangiing pots and pans at night in residential neighborhoods to intentionally disturb the peace, attacking police, throwing Molotov cocktails and other projectiles at police, blocking roads and bridges…
This is just one example of the many protests and civil disobedience that has previously happened in Canada with no invocation of the emergency act.
Remember the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010?
The disparate treatment of left-wing protests vs right-wing protests is becoming glaringly obvious, both here and in the States.
Given the use of arrests, police force, kettling, and tear gas during your listed events and the lack of any fucking action by police at all in Ottawa prior to (or near to) the EA being invoked I’m not sure these are the best analogies to go with.
The real emergency was the utter failure of every level of government and police to actually do their damn jobs.
Sam’s post above simply illustrates that in the case of past protests, the police and governments did their jobs, sometimes going above and beyond to smash heads, arrest anyone who moved and break up protests using sometimes very harsh means. In THIS CASE, however, the police did fuck all, and as we’ve heard, sometimes colluded with the protesters by sending them information.
Um, the police respond to violence. Were the truckers violent? Did they do anything to warrant being clubbed and tear-gassed?
Lots of peaceful protests take place without any police violence. Unfortunately, modern left-wing protests seem to come with violence almost guaranteed. If the truckers had started throwing Molotov cocktails, I guarantee you the police would have been a lot less restrained.
It was not a Tu Quoque. It was evidence that other, more violent protests have taken place in Canada in the past without the invocatioin of the EA. Refuting the point that the Trucker protests were somehow unique or a unique thrreat that required a crackdown. Want me to list some other Canadian riots, blockades, and political violence in the recent past that didn’t cause the government to invoke the Emergency Act?
The truckers clearly violated laws for unlawful assembly and common nuisance, in my inexpert view. But this is not sedition. It is not terrorism. By itself, this was justification for police to enforce the laws, which they understandably felt overwhelmed to do, at least initially. They deserve a break given the novelty of the situation and relative non-violence. If they were complicit, however, this is far from ideal. But what lessons have been learned?
I think freezing bank accounts to get people to leave was a step too far. I am unsure if freezing crowdsourced funds was.
I agree the government justifications have changed and some have not held up. I do not personally think the government met the criteria under the CSIS Act. However, I do think economic relationships and reputation were at risk and these are reasonable things to consider.
And yet in all of those events government and law enforcement took action. In the case of Ottawa no action took place, police failed to enforce anything, some allowed the occupiers to dig in and the two most immediate levels of government did nothing.
And remember I’m not going to mention associated activities/blockades where weapons and plans to kill police officers existed. I’m sure had Ottawa’s occupation continued those little glowing embers would never have caught.
So how long should Ottawa have been occupied? How long should the occupiers have had to fortify a stand off “nest”? How long should Ottawa have had slow rolling truck protest. King laughingly agreed with slow rolling schools as an intimidation tactic. Oh, I’m sure to be cast in the light of teaching children to value of peaceful protests while revving engines, giving the finger to teachers and driving by with “Fuck Trudeau” scrawled in soap on their windows.
My problem is the Emergencies Act, as a replacement for the War Measures Act, wasn’t intended for this kind of event. And yet the facts on the ground are that nothing really happened until it was. What I want from this inquiry is blame allocated, criteria defined and processes improved.
On the upside it did help clarify my judgement of the character of Poilievre, Bergen, and Ford.
Logically, if the proposed Alberta law is unconstitutional, isn’t the appropriate recourse… to challenge such matters in the Supreme Court?
I mean, surely not every law that turns out to be unconstitutional is sedition? Otherwise, man, there’s been a LOT of sedition, by every government we have.
It’s different from sedition for the rather straightforward reason that it’s not sedition. Sedition is the advocacy of force without authority of law to change government. That’s not what the “sovereignty act” does. It may be stupid, and it’s definitely going to be found unconstitutional, but it’s not sedition.
“Meddling” isn’t a term of art. It depends what you mean.
Clearly, some things absolutely WOULD be illegal. Foreign money is rather clearly restricted in many ways, for instance . Many political advertising efforts would be illegal. Those are certainly meddling.
That’s not at all an accurate representation of what I was saying. I agree that laws have sometimes been passed that have been deemed unconstitutional, most famously Canada’s abortion laws which were completely and unconditionally overturned.
What I’m saying is that Danielle Smith’s platform claimed that they would simply ignore federal laws and Supreme Court rulings that they didn’t like. Given this context, suggesting that “if the proposed Alberta law is unconstitutional, isn’t the appropriate recourse… to challenge such matters in the Supreme Court?” seems rather a disingenuous circular argument, since Smith’s whole premise was that they couldn’t care less what the Supreme Court of Canada has to say. It was clearly a policy of lawlessness.
Clearly, this philosophy doesn’t just undermine but fundamentally destroys our whole system of democratic governance. So yes, “sedition” is an entirely appropriate description.
But Smith is not proposing to just ignore the law, and even that is not sedition. It’s definitely not to use force to simply subvert federal law. That latter state would be sedition.
She is proposing to pass a law that would all Alberta to ignore federal laws that allegedly infringe on Alberta’s powers as a province. (As we don’t have the text of such a law, rather generic, nebulous statements of intent are all we have.) Confusingly, they have claimed this law will respect the Constitution and SC decisions, which… makes it sound like it’s going to end up being just a wholly symbolic thing anyway.
If it DOES step on the federal government’s toes in terms of the separation of powers, that’s a matter resolved in the courts, is it not?
Apparently, the Minister of Justice wanted to send in the police and considered the possibility of using them in conjunction with the Canadian Forces (with tanks!) against the convoy after four days. Look, I don’t support the convoy in the slightest. Like a literal 0.000000000…% support, but that’s ridiculous. I hope he resigns as minister or Trudeau removes him. That is not the kind of attitude that Canadians want, or at least I hope not. Unreal.
If the convoy told police they would leave after the weekend, didn’t, and disturbed local people, they should have been charged at that time as an unlawful assembly, if this is the law that correctly applied to this.
Thinking the Canadian Forces were the best way to handle this is crazy, as to rely on them for every disaster or heavy snowfall. Tanks are much crazier.
What is the actual evidence this was a rally of those with right wing views rather than disaffected truckers or peaceful protestors?
Not sure anyone came out of this looking very good.
Here’s some evidence. There’s also the Diagaolon connection with the clowns who clogged the commerce in Coutts as well as all the white supremacist swag left behind on the streets of Calgary in the wake of weekly pro-disease marches.
The United Conservative Party of Alberta has introduced Bill 1 - The “ALBERTA SOVEREIGNTY WITHIN A UNITED CANADA” act.
Honestly this reads like a “notwithstanding clause without being a notwithstanding clause” reach by Alberta.
But I am curious about why is “patent unreasonableness” being used? On looking it up, it seems that test was set aside by the Supreme Court in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick - Wikipedia so why would you reference a no longer used test unless the test that has been set aside has a higher bar than the current one.
I have not read it, not sure if I would understand the legalese if I did. Reading some opinion pieces on it.
I guess I am biased from the beginning because I detest Danielle Smith and the anti-everything-that-Canada-is stance of her and her followers. They hate public education, universal health care, evolution, science, etc. They beleive in that old bullshit rural Alberta exceptionalism. I just hope we can get them kicked out before they do too much damage.
She is too much for even Jason Kenney who finally walked away from it today.
Not according to Danielle Smith, who has said, at least in some iteration of her blathering about this “sovereignty” nonsense, that among Alberta’s asserted rights will be the right to ignore the federal courts.
This is mainly a political statement to appeal to the many people in Alberta persuaded the federal government does not emphasize local needs. Alberta may have some legitimate concerns (equalization is sometimes a mess, exporting oil and gas is not unreasonable), but the things Smith emphasizes: direct control over health, maligning reasonable Covid interventions and vaccines, etc. makes one hope she is right when she says the bill should never be used.
I have friends in Alberta who honestly believe in all of this… They firmly believe that they are smarter and better than other Canadians, because they were clever enough to discover large amounts of carbon-based fuel buried in the ground, and the other provinces are just too stupid to do the same.
