The fact that they are so angry at these truckers they are willing to give up due process in a court of law and think it is such a good thing the government can swoop in and freeze someone’s money. I think it is very dangerous and worry some unhinged person will lose it and go from protesting to attacking. I didn’t donate to these truckers and I never participated in any protests so suppose I don’t have to worry this time. I also like to point out that yes the truckers were breaking the law. This angers people so much. I always like to remind them breaking the law is actually an unsung right we have as Canadians. Yes we can go to jail but we are not put in a chair and tortured or killed or have our family rounded up and executed. And this is a good thing. It was only in the 1970s that Canada last locked up a man for life after his third offence for being gay. So thankfully people fought those laws and protested in the streets openly gay which was illegal. So personally I don’t know if I support these truckers but if they are willing to break the law and be arrested for what they believe in by defying an order to leave then I think it is great. I do not condone violence however and the few fringe protesters doing dumb things should be arrested and charged. But standing in the street refusing to leave that’s something we should be thankful we can do.
I think it's important that we draw a line in the sand about what is acceptable behaviour in society.
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
Would you have supported the US government applying the metrics for when protests should be shut down, and all financial supporters have their accounts frozen without due process. for the BLM protests in summer 2020?
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero
career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
