Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

Harassing people, preventing people sleeping for weeks, this is not "inconvenience" it's violence and intimidation against fellow citizens. I have zero sympathy or tolerance for violent occupations that force people out of their home, nor their supporters who try to pretend these things didn't happen.

But that's what makes a protest effective: it's inconvenient! Otherwise, the protest has no power to change anything.

Well that's kind of the point - protesters don't have the power to change anything based on physical inconvenience. The inconvenience is merely a PR effort because protesters don't have any more effective form of of PR - if people are famous/wealthy/powerful/etc. they have better forms of PR available.

The problem with some styles of protest is that they're asymmetrical in terms of damage. A relatively small number of people who get worked up enough can congregate in one location and indefinitely shut down the operations of a person/group/organization/government. At some point the legitimate governing body needs to enforce the functioning of society, or they'll lose the mandate to govern.

Spring 2012. Montréal.

It was left leaning and Police were quite happy to handle it with all they got. Many hundreds or thounsands of protester everyday (or nights) for over 100 days. 17 years-old students being hit with Baton, pepper spray, , tears gas, rubber bullets, flashbang etc. It was so chaotic that vladimir fucking putin even call canada to sort its shit (!!!). Since then police really has dialed it back in the protest.

The emergencies act is extremely restrictive. The criteria:

There must be an urgent, critical and temporary situation that “seriously endangers” the lives, health and safety of Canadians, and it must be so significant as to exceed the capacity or authority of the provinces to address it.

A foreign funded group with heavy vehicles invaded and took over downtown Ottawa and international border crossings. The province wasn't interested in dispersing them.

The Emergencies Act definition wouldn't allow you to halt a coup attempt if Ontario could handle it but chose not to. At a certain point you have to analyze things and say that if the law has a massive loophole then the law was poorly drafted.

So if that wasn't enough to invoke the emergency act then it's hard for me to imagine why the Truckers were

Possibly because the truckers blocked a bridge to the US, and the US didn't like that.

Let's park 100 trucks outside your house for 'a few short days' and blast their horns. Then you can tell me if those days are short or not.

I have friends who live downtown Ottawa. I know exactly what went on. I know what flags were on display.

People need to stop down playing what happened.

I personally measured over 90dB in a friend’s apartment downtown. NIOSH recommends exposure to levels above 90dB for less than 30 minutes per (work) day. She said it was that loud 24/7, and I believe that.

If you have some evidence that it’s safe to listen to sound levels above 90dB for extended periods of time, I’d recommend you publish it.

The shots weren't mandated. You couldn't enjoy services like cross-country travel by air or rail, but the shots were absolutely not mandated to do most things -- at least, not by the government. To the vast majority of Canadians, those are not essential services for survival, and to those Canadians for whom they are (mostly those living in northern communities), they got about the usual amount of support they get from any federal government (which is to say, not enough, and that probably merits more discussion than the convoy protesters).

- If you worked from an office, you likely spent a good chunk of the first 12-24 months of Covid working from home. After that, it was up to your employer to put into place a policy about that.

  - Addendum: if you were in the federal government, you *were* required to get an initial shot plus a booster for most parts of the federal government. Failure to do so was dealt with in a few ways depending on department, but would usually result in your being placed on unpaid leave (PSAC has made it very difficult to fire someone in general, including under these circumstances).

- If you worked in the Forces, I gather you really didn't have much of a say in the matter, but militaries worldwide have strict and extensive vaccine schedules for all enlisted staff (and often officers, too).

The bodily autonomy argument holds some water, sure, to the same extent as you have the choice not to vaccinate your kid as they start going to school (but don't be surprised if they can't go, because we as a society have decided that things like polio don't deserve a repeat performance).

You were at no point prohibited from leaving the country, though you could de facto end up so because other countries likely wouldn't allow you in, at least, not without a Covid test.

If you were a Canadian citizen, you could not be legally denied entry into Canada, though because of the circumstances you may have been, at different points, required to either undergo a test or to go through a quarantine period.

These people were protesting being denied the ability to pick and choose what they do in society while unilaterally picking and choosing how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.

Frankly, this is probably best showcased by them deciding to just decide to take over the Ottawa baseball stadium (which is in a suburb and next to a highway) and use it and a few other places around downtown to store propane, gas, and other heating fluids since they decided to do this in the winter.

They were, at best, hypocrites, and massively reckless in the face of what was at the time still relatively speaking a medical unknown.

I'll also add, Re: the use of the Emergencies Act: regardless of what I think, a federal court has ruled it unconstitutional; the government has expressed interest in appealing the decision. I don't have a legal background, so I don't have a useful comment to add here.

I will say that it came after several weeks of multiple levels of police (but most notably, OPS) failing to do anything about the protests while tensions escalated, so it didn't come out of nowhere, and it wasn't the first thing the government tried.

Hmm it looks like all protest are being dealt very softly now. Natives? We don't want another 1990 oka. Students? Don't want another 2012 printemps érable. Truckers? Well I'm not sure about that one. Was the majority of the police on the protester's side? A bunch sure. But most? Nah. Wasn't there like only 1% of all truckers there? They had the means but not the number. Also if freezing bank account ended it without any police lifting a finger, it's best no?

I am sure Canada has the progressivist ratchet like the US does: Left moves Overton Window never less than a click, Right moves it never more than a click

That's what happens when there is change in the world. Conservatives resist change, but change often has a momentum of it's own.

The world has changed a lot recently. TV brought everyone together. Transportation made the world smaller place. The internet and social networks gave everyone a voice. These are all game changers. For better and worse. We can't un-invent all that stuff.

The reason older people tend to be conservative is that they are used to the way things were when they grew up. They don't like the changes. They want the good old days back.

Young people don't have these notions about the good old days, they weren't around. They started off with a different view of things. The Overton Window moves with them. Progress ratchets, as you said.

p.s. None of this implies that I endorse how the protests were handled. I'm all for democracy and 100% against authoritarians - whether they are communists or fascists or whatever else.

There's a case to be made that a naked display of force - at least in a democracy - is less authoritarian than quietly destroying someone's financial life. Spraying pepper spray and knocking heads creates some very unsavoury images that the government has to contend with during the next election and stokes outrage. Having a bunch of people's bank accounts frozen doesn't trigger the same visceral reaction.

What? There has been absolutely no blowback when Quebec used it. And minimal blowback for all other uses. This is just a weird cope, people don't really care if they use it here. It's sad but true.

Keep what in check? The war measures act has been used twice in 60 years!

The trucker fiasco ended only when the Ukraine war substituted the COVID madness

Before the last 9 years of the Liberals there was 9 years of the Conservatives. Prior to that there were 12 years of Liberals and before that 10 years of Conservatives. Saying there is one ruling party in Canada ignores the majority of Canadian history. Furthermore, since you brought up partisanship, it's worth noting that outside of Quebec, only members of conservative provincial parties have invoked the notwithstanding clause.

The important ones

Also. Its very scary the workd we live in

It has obviously increased rights in some areas, but the federal government has also stripped rights because of their increased power. I don't know if there could be a way to determine if more or less rights have been given due to this change.

Antisocial elements in many states was dragging the rest of the country down and due to increasing federal power we were able to override them.

Not to pick on you, but I want to point this out: this sort of thinking is a vulnerability which can and does get exploited in politics. It is a fallacy that Progress is inevitable and that The Right Thing always plays out, and that the one holding a perspective on this always was born in the fully legitimate and righteous branch of events. Nature is not just; nature simply is.

1984 is now literally becoming possible!

I assume you are refering to the automatic music writing machine the proles are fed with? LLMs seem to be capable of that now.

(1984 is a low tech society and have been possible since the 50s, except for that machine.)

One of the main reasons I feel so strongly about topics like this is that I think we're sleepwalking into authoritarianism, if we haven't already arrived. So take your comment - that the government surveilling places where there is no expectation of privacy is okay. And now think about the countries that have done precisely this - secret police spying on people in public, building up profiles on people, informants making sure nobody's getting up to anything the government might be concerned about, and so on. These are terrible places in history, literally every last one of them. Doesn't it feel to you that we're on the path to repeating this?

I mean we're not not only doing the exact same stuff, but going above and beyond it. The thing about authoritarianism is that people seem to associate with some leader just oppressing the people - helpless to resist, but historically that's not how it works at all. In reality, authoritarianism tends to have an in-group and an out-group. And the in-group often feels neutral to highly positive about the authoritarian government, and feel they're only doing what is necessary to maintain proper peace, order, and value. To this day you can find people with extremely positive views of Stalin - not just for defeating Nazism but for his reign in general. This includes many whose family (and in some instances even themselves - though their numbers are decreasing due to age) lived through this time! This video [1] turned into a meme, but it's genuine and part of a real interview.

I somehow get the impression you're around my age. If I'm correct there then imagine taking yourself back to the early 2000s or maybe even earlier, and describing to your youthful self what America would be like in 20 years. You wouldn't believe yourself - it'd sound like absolute insanity. But because it's all happened inch by inch, it all feels kind of normal. But I think, and hope, that when you describing what we're going through today, to your children or your children's children 20 or 40 years from now, that they'll find it just as unbelievable as the you of 20 years ago might have found it.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF0JdAim6Pc

If you haven’t seen it, Patriot is fabulous and clearly has little to no interest in portraying anything close to objective reality, but instead conveys a subjective experience with just enough jargon and cartoon-intuitively-correct techniques (eg “The Vantasner Danger Meridian”) to tether it down and give some genre structure to the real narrative (John’s emotional journey toward finding his own identity outside of his family and his work).

Even if one pressed play expecting Carre or The Wire, I imagine by the time the main character finds himself slow-motion dog-piled under 5 Brazilian jujitsu experts who are brothers and dress identically (after just such a scenario was lightly foreshadowed several scenes before), viewers might realize they’ve walked into something unexpected (and imo magical).

It’s not about the way things work — it’s about the way life feels.