Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada
cbc.caI still don't understand why the police didn't do their job and the emergency powers were used in the first place
The correct solution to illegal behavior in a healthy democracy is to arrest someone and try them in court. We shouldn't be denying that to to anybody no matter how wrong they are.
There should be proportionate responses to illegal behavior. Not even attempting to address to illegal behavior with the appropriate government response should not be a justification for more severe government response.
Simply not wanting to go through the process of arresting people shouldn't be sufficient cause for emergency powers.
The federal Canadian government could not direct the police without using the emergency powers and the original police chief seemed to favor the protestors. The police in Canada, just like America, have had no issue cracking down on other protests, and started doing so after Sloly was replaced
So why didn't the Ottowa and Ontario government tell the police to crack down? After all it's the Ottawa residents that were so inconvenienced.
Did the city or provincial government instruct them to? Did they refuse?
From what I’ve gathered it’s mostly municipal incompetence.
Ottawa police let them get entrenched, going so far as to offer use of a city owned baseball stadium parking lot which rapidly became a logistics base. They assumed protestors would park their rigs and travel in to the city to protest in a traditional way.
Instead protestors set up camp on downtown streets in a weekend and the local police had no idea what to do. By then it was too late. There were over 8000 people present the first weekend.
Police stated that attempts at enforcement would not be safe, probably because police felt just as threatened as residents did and they simply didn’t have the numbers to break it up.
They then shifted their plan to “maybe they’ll get tired” for two weeks which took us right up to the emergency act being enacted and police being able to muster the numbers required to disperse the protest.
At the provincial level, well, it’s an election year and the premier has an awful lot of voters who agree with the protestors, so he did his tried and true crisis management technique of hiding in a dark room.
^this with the additional tidbit that from what I’ve read the police chief at the time was put in place in the wake of the blm protests to help fix relations between the police and the populace of Ottawa, so this may have been a pendulum swing of the police going too easy after they went too hard on the black community.
The timing of who got the kids gloves and who got the truncheon is probably increasing how angry everyone is
Sincere thanks for the comprehensive response free of vitriol. It certainly helps paint a more complete picture.
It sounds like the there was a major disagreement between the federal and provincial governments about how to handle the illegal protest, and perhaps more importantly, who will take the heat for breaking it up.
I'm not sure if that makes the outcome more or less of a travesty. It seems the capability do disband the protest was there all along, but prevented by political disfunction and lack of leadership.
Welcome to highly polarized politics. The police have a hard lean to the right, and they can exercise discretion with regards to what laws they enforce and when. Folks on the right want to abolish the mainstream media because of a perception of bias. Folks on the left want to abolish the police because of a perception of bias. Will anything change, or will we get further entrenched until there's a civil war?
Previous thread - interesting to see which comments there didn't age well over 24 hrs.
Thanks. This should be pinned to the top.
Is there any move towards an investigation of some sort into whether Trudeau will face penalties of some sort for invoking these extreme measures without the justification of there being no other law to address the issues?
Specifically I am thinking about this interesting interview with Dr. Leah West onthe Michael Geist LawBytes podcast. From about 8 minutes onwards they discuss whether the terrorist justification or the foreign influence justification existed: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/02/law-bytes-podcast-episod...
It is interesting to see some commentators in this HN thread trying to suggest Russian influence. (And also IMO not very convincing).
In any case, whatever opinion you have on this, it's a good podcast.
Given all the excitement about this topic, I thought it was important to share that the emergency is over.
I look forward towards the investigations about foreign interference. Should be enlightening for other countries as well.
Is this one of those cases when xenophobia is ok?
No. This is one of those cases where we find out a war has already started and we didn't notice because the weapons are too new.
Nice try though.
Do you think Gretchen Whitmer told Trudeau what to do again?
In case anyone did not catch this: ""Resolve this:" Gov. Whitmer calls on Canadian government to reopen Ambassador Bridge" https://wwmt.com/news/state/resolve-this-gov-whitmer-calls-o...
A shaming moment for Canada.
We’re absolutely already at war. Our institutions are being used against us. However, we are resilient. Anecdotally, I admit to falling for Russian disinfo in the past. Mea culpa. Now I’m a lot more wary and open eyed about how this stuff is generated and spread. I think every day, a number of adults learn for the first time they were duped by online misinformation, and will take steps to prevent it in the future. Hopefully this process happens faster than our enemy is able to deceive us.
Just so that we`re absolutely clear on what you are saying: you think that this protest is something started by the Russians somehow?
There was no emergency, just a huge annoyance that could have been cleared without dictatorial powers.
It was pretty clear during the protest that the Ottawa police were unable or unwilling to tackle the protest. Given the breakdown in the ability to restore order, most Canadians agree that the emergency was warranted.
Using the phrase "dictatorial powers" to describe a bill explicitly designed to balance rights and forward action is incindiary language.
>Ottawa police were unable or unwilling to tackle the protest
I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for why this was.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea that the police declining to do their job is sufficient to emergency powers.
There should be proportionate responses to illegal behavior. Not even attempting to regulate illegal behavior with the appropriate government response should not be a justification for more severe government response.
Local police sympathized based on their knowledge of living there. Outside police were brought in because they can abuse the people and then leave and not worry about being shamed. They needed non-locals to do the dirty work.
Calling someone's opinions incendiary is incendiary.
Another reminder of what Bitcoin is good for. The article currently links to another one that says they froze 200 bank accounts and are now unfreezing most of them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin... https://archive.fo/lAT62
It's a terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we've become to arbitrary and lawless government actions in our near-cashless society.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446703
Bitcoin won't help you here: you still need to convert things to fiat to get anything done. And if shops start taking Bitcoin, the government will simply regulate those payments as well.
Crypto doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Holding your savings instead of entrusting them to a bank prevents the government from freezing them. If you try to do this in cash, you lose the ability to transmit them over the internet, and it's easy enough for burglars (or enterprising traffic-stop cops) to just walk away with your savings. Bitcoin allows you to hold your savings without losing the ability to spend them.
It's true that you still need to convert them to local currency to spend them, same as US dollar bills, which are the popular savings vehicle here in Argentina. Around here, mostly the same networks of illegal money-changers handle dollars, Bitcoin, and gold jewelry, though there are some that only handle one or two of these.
In support of your position, this article:
Those are indeed very serious problems with Bitcoin, but they are not the problem the parent was talking about.
I disagree. the government can tell (and has told) everyone that certain bitcoins are radioactive, making it hard or even impossible to spend them. There was a Matt Levine article about bitcoin laundering. It is much harder than I thought.
The problem is that, even if you think this is the kind of thing the government should be able to do, they haven't told me which ones are "radioactive". So if someone uses one of those bitcoins to buy something from me, I might have trouble spending it afterwards. Failures of fungibility like that are potentially a big problem for a currency. So far they're only a small problem for Bitcoin, but as these examples show, they have the potential to become significant. That might create pressure to move to a coin like ZCash, Monero, or Mimblewimble which has built-in safeguards against such things.
how much harder. If Canadians government make some bitcoin radioactive i’m sure bitcoin trader in china would not mind giving me ETH in exchange for some bitcoin.
how can government regulate bitcoin if shops start accepting it? Not saying they can’t but i’m just curious what this would mean.
It would not be the first time store decide to accept an unofficial currency
the us government creates an insane global appetite for us dollars. they regulate the exchange points, and it’s almost the same thing.
The US government definitely does not regulate the guy downtown who exchanges my dollars for pesos, except in the sense that they could place economic sanctions on him if they decided he was a "terrorist" or something.
you think the us government doesn’t tax the guy downtown in us dollars?
No, absolutely not. That's ridiculous. I live in Argentina.
Localmonero?
You still have a lot of options with crypto even without the exchanges. I pay for DNS and my VOIP service with it and could pay for a lot more if I had to.
Bitcoin doesn’t “solve” what is essentially a human problem. No amount of encryption and obfuscation will stop a $5 wrench.
Bitcoin does solve it (or, rather, people holding their savings themselves instead of lending them to a centralized intermediary does solve it). When everyone's savings are in the bank, you only have to use the $5 wrench on a single bank executive to take a million people's money. When everyone's savings are in their own possession, you have to use a million $5 wrenches on a million people, one at a time, to take their money, and you don't initially know which of those people has how much money.
I mean, yes, the government can still probably take your money, or for that matter kill you with impunity. But it's a good idea to put some obstacles in their way that aren't merely procedural.
the 5$ wrench in this case is not a good analogy because there is no way to know who own a bitcoin wallet. Thus you don’t know who you should use the 5$ wrench on.
That's probably overstating the degree of security Bitcoin gives you in practice, but it's likely better than having a centralized list of names and account numbers.
Apparently the senate was set on voting against the act, which is very uncommon considering that they usually rubber stamp whatever the MPs voted for. That's not the official reason but it's the only one that makes sense considering the timing.
I guess the senate reforms to make it more independent actually yielded some results (one of the good things trudeau did, back when he was a lot less politically hawkish). The lawsuits were also piling up but those will continue I think. In any case this has been a disaster for the liberals and for Canada's reputation and I'm pleasantly surprised by the senate. I can see why it's not necessarily an uncessary, antiquated institution now. Checks and balances!