[ladallada]

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.

[afiori]

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)

[NhanH]

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

[ladallada]

> 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.

[NhanH]

> 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.

[telephone2]

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.

[winkeltripel]

> you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.

Seems to be a valid assumption.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...

[sangnoir]

> 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.

[sebow]

> 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.

[ahtihn]

> 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.

[sebow]

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.

[pclmulqdq]

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.

[notafraudster]

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.

[oalders]

> killing peoples' pets

Citation needed.

[pclmulqdq]

Here you go: https://twitter.com/OttawaBylaw/status/1494306645274509316?r...

[oalders]

That's not what "relinquished" means.

[pclmulqdq]

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.

EDIT: I don't like politifact as a source because it has a lot of bias (despite the name), but here's a citation on the shelter's (Ottawa Humane Society) kill rate: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/22/facebook-p...

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."

[oalders]

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.