[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.