They want to ruin the lives of those who oppose them. The Canadian Liberal government has previously attempted the same goal by de-banking protestors, in a move that the courts later ruled unconstitutional.
If there's an avenue for extrajudicial punishment it seems like every government is angling to use it. How did we wind up with such openly vindictive and unprincipled people in our governments? Like you call yourself Liberals, surely it's clear as day that such a thing isn't compatible with how you believe government should operate. You're doing this because you can't arrest them for a crime—shouldn't that give you pause?
Liberals believe in things like free speech and equal protection under the law. There isn't a political party in the English speaking world who uses the word 'Liberal' in their name which is actually Liberal. Every single one of them is better described as Socialist or Marxist.
You want to know what a liberal sounds like? Listen to Bill Clinton's speech in the 90s or a current day Republican. Those are liberals.
Credit where it's due I think Republicans, people whose political ideology is Republicanism as opposed to the RNC whose dominant political ideology is now Conservatism, can still lay claim to those things. But they are a dying breed aren't they.
> Every single one of them is better described as Socialist or Marxist.
I mean, this is just delusional.
Most liberal politicians in the US are slightly center right. And the US is not alone in that.
There's very, very, VERY few marxists out there. What happens is that someone is neoliberal in 99% of circumstances. And then they take a slightly more communal approach to one problem. And now, they're Marxist.
Uh, no. They're neoliberal, they're just not stubborn.
If you're on the US and you advocate, say, single payer healthcare, you're not a Marxist. You can listen to these people. They're staunch capitalists, and they're arguing we should make an exception for this one thing.
No one got "debanked", it was a temporary freeze for a few days and for a small number of accounts. I also disagree that it was to ruin the lives of those who oppose them, the money was released back to them, that seems like an odd way to ruin someone's life. Surely the tyrannical Liberal government would have been able to do more than keep them from accessing their money for a few days if they truly wanted to ruin lives.
It may very well be trivial for a few days, but it's worth considering the full length it could be in effect for. The emergency act after initial confirmation can be in effect for 30 days before reapproval (it can be voluntarily ended as it was in the convoy instance).
If we put someone in jail, as in to disable their ability to interface with society, we would have the expectation to feed and shelter them decently for that duration. Removing access to funds under the emergency act has no baseline duty of care expected from the government, despite government action disabling them from acquiring food or shelter independently in modern society for a number of days beyond which someone could starve. The number of days is unpredictably constrained by popular sentiment in a heated moment not a pre-encoded ethical baseline.
I don't think this hypothetical and the potential grave consequences is going to be often likely, yet i don't see why it need be a possibility to entertain.
Yes. They did attack their sources of income and blocked protestors from accessing THEIR money to stop them from protesting.
You minimizing it like "just a few accounts, just a few days" is not only false but also doesn't acknowledge the fact that it should NEVER Happen.
But hey, there's always the one saying that reality doesn't happen even when the government attacks from all angles as a coercion mechanism. What's the euphemism now? What's the handbook? "Free speech but not freedom of consequences"?
It's not false, the Emergencies Act was only invoked from February 14th 2022 to February 23rd 2022. That's 9 days. Between 180 and 219 accounts were frozen based on the sources I found. Please tell me which part is false.
Let's not defend the konvoy agitators here, these were legit seditionists who were given far too much leeway to start with. Cutting off their access to crowdsourced funds was too little too late, they should have been shut down more forcefully much sooner.
One person's "sedition" or "insurrection" is another's "protest" or "activism".
As an objective matter, the convoy protests are documented to have resulted in no deaths, eight injuries and a few hundred arrests (and very speculative estimates of economic damage); whereas the George Floyd protests are documented to have resulted in nineteen confirmed deaths, over 14,000 arrests and ten figures of directly measurable economic damage (i.e. insurance claims resulting from vandalism and arson).
> ..who were given far too much leeway to start with.
Listen to your language. Freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful protest are now far too much leeway? The very rights protected by the Charter? Because they are protesting against things you like? Or protesting for things you don't like? Your like and dislike trumps their freedom does it?
You do realize who you sound like, don't you? Think about it. Mull it over carefully in your mind. Your rhetoric is dangerously close to a well-known Sozialisticher party.
"Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
Next time you want to protest something your government is doing (ie, a bill to restrict internet access without due process), remember your comment. The truckers were peaceful and principled.
I wish I was surprised that people can hold opinions such as this, but I see so many cheering for authoritarianism in what once were liberal societies. Freedom dies not with a bang but a wimper after being crushed by people with "good intentions".
