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What’s going on in Canada?

Brian Leiter

A reader writes:

I am a long time follower of your blog, and wanted to write in to ask whether you might consider a post soliciting comments (or giving your own thoughts) regarding the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act by the Canadian Trudeau government in response to the Trucker Convoy Protest. I would be particularly interested in hearing readers thoughts regarding the legality of the protests and the degree to which its actions have or have not justified the Act’s invocation, and in particular regarding the seizing of assets of people who attended the protest or were associated with it. I would also be curious to hear a legal perspective on the descriptions of the protest as “occupations" and the like — the trucks did after all block road access in a capital city, etc. Lastly, I would be especially interested in perspectives on the historical legality of road blockades as civil protest measures.

Here's a NYT account from yesterday.   The Emergency Measures Act seems to be fraught with the potential for abuse; whether it was abused here, I'm not sure.  Comments are open for informed comments about the questions raised, not meltdowns and ranting!

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28 responses to “What’s going on in Canada?”

  1. Edward Tingley

    Is civil disobedience illegal? It is purposefully disobedient, to voice, demonstrate, significant public objection to a wrong not being treated as wrong. When does this become illegal?

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    Not sure I understand: if it doesn't involve illegal conduct, it's not civil disobedience.

    Reply
  3. Mark Capustin

    I think that it is significant that the convoy's organizers demanded that the government meet their demands or resign and be replaced by a "citizens' committee". While it is true that a few years ago, First Nations groups protesting pipelines blocked railroads for a longer period of time without threat of the Emergencies Act being invoked, to my knowledge, they did not express any intention to displace the government.

    Reply
  4. Dean C. Rowan

    I can't vouch for the reliability, but Glenn Greenwald just posted remarks by Rav Arora, a "young Canadian," about the Canadian government's actions: https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-young-canadian-authoritarianism-574

    Reply
  5. David Zimmerman

    A note about Rav Arora's "reliability"— From the end blurb on Greenwald's blog:

    "Rav Arora
    Essayist. Writing on violent crime, vaccine mandates, and psychedelic therapy. Seen on podcasts with Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, Adam Carolla etc."

    Guilt by association, I know… but Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro?

    Reply
  6. Brian Leiter

    Anything Greenwald endorses should be approached with caution! He's increasingly having trouble telling night from day.

    Reply
  7. Michel Xhignesse

    I'm nowhere near Ottawa any more (I'm on the other side of the country!), and the coverage has not been great, in my opinion, so it's hard to know exactly what to think. I thus defer to those better acquainted with events.

    Let me begin by saying that I do not support these protesters or their message in any way at all. (Indeed, it seems like a particularly idiotic protest, given that they're targeting the _federal_ government when health is a _provincial_ responsibility. I suspect that's got a lot more to do with the Liberals being in power federally than anything else–that is to say, they're far-rightists, and they just don't like that the Conservatives–specifically the Reform wing of the party–aren't in power)

    On the one hand, it seems to me that protests are not supposed to be convenient, and that accepting them as an integral part of free speech means that we have to be ready to accept that they will sometimes be extremely disruptive, including economically. Without direct action, of which civil disobedience is a part, it seems like there's really no point to protesting–you may as well just stand around in a sympathetic farmer's field and hope somebody drives by and counts you.

    On that note, I think it's important to remember that this is not a particularly large protest, and that we have seen protests in the tens and hundreds of thousands in relatively recent history. Nor is Ottawa a stranger to protests. The student protests in Montréal in 2012 completely paralyzed the city for months as thousands marched every day, tens of thousands once a month or so, and hundreds of thousands a couple of times. Just before COVID, supply lines within the country were _severely_ disrupted by an Indigenous blockade of rail lines across the country to protest government actions (including violent RCMP enforcement) in defence of pipeline construction on unceded Wet'suwet'en land. Those all seem perfectly OK forms of nonviolent protest to me (but, yes, very disruptive).

    On the other hand, it sounds like things in Ottawa were different–but here, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what that difference was. One difference that has emerged as salient for me is that protesters blared mechanically-assisted noise for 16+ hours a day in and near residential neighbourhoods. In an interrogational or carceral context, I would call that torture, and I’m not convinced the label is inapt here. So that’s a big one. And I find it completely inexplicable that it was left to a 21-year-old resident to file an injunction to have them stop.

    Another salient difference seems to be that protesters camped in place. That's not something that's happened at any protests I've attended–we always dispersed in the evening, even if we came back the next day. It's a feature I associate with protests in remote locations, where accommodations are not available, but not cities. With it seems to have come a lot of open-flame fires in the heart of the city, which is obviously not something you can just do in a city. So there's that, too. Also rigging up fuel lines so that the trucks could idle all day–again, that doesn't seem particularly safe or desirable for a city-bound protest. Neither of those last two, on its own, seems entirely beyond the pale–it's the sort of thing you'd want police to police and ticket, but manageable.

    When you add in protesters defecating in the streets and on lawns, harassing residents (including with rape threats), forcing soup kitchens to feed them, flying Nazi and confederate flags (possibly also violating hate speech laws), etc., it really stops looking like any protest I've attended. Not to mention the fact that at none of the protests I've participated in did we see politicians posing for photos with us, nor did we receive funding from sympathizers in the US or message amplification from US media (e.g. Fox News). Indeed, in my experience the protests I've participated in–which have almost all been much larger!–were _much_ better behaved. One day during the student protests in Montréal, for example, someone (in a crowd of hundreds of thousands) tried to fly a nazi or confederate flag (I don't remember which). That person was surrounded by protesters, made to take the flag down, and was unceremoniously booted out (they may well have rejoined the queue, but not with the flag). And while the student protests were loud, the noise was along the direction of march and didn't last all day and all night (it was also concentrated downtown). Those all seem like important differences.

    What's really astounding is the total absence of the police in Ottawa until recently. I don't think I've ever seen so much tolerance for such badly-behaved protesters. For context, every year Queen's University's homecoming sees several thousand students partying inside a radius of about three blocks (~8000 people in 2021…). And every year, Ontario buses in _hundreds_ of cops to maintain order there. They don't just sit around. Now, I think that the bar for police intervention–especially violent intervention, but also arrests–should be fairly high, but given how they behave when it's students, environmentalists, or Indigenous people protesting (again, in larger numbers), it's hard to understand what they were doing in Ottawa for three weeks. At a minimum, it seems like they should have been enforcing noise and dangerous materials bylaws.

    Which takes us to the Emergencies Act. My strong suspicion is that it was invoked due to pressure from the US, which wasn't a fan of the border blockades. As far as I can see from what the government has said, however, I just don't see how on earth it's justified: this just _isn't_ a national emergency: it's not a particularly urgent or critical situation, it doesn't seriously endanger the lives, health, or safety of Canadians, it doesn't exceed the provincial authority or capacity to deal with it, it doesn't threaten the federal government's sovereignty or the country's territorial integrity, etc. And, clearly, it _can_ be dealt with by existing laws, since police started doing stuff (and broke up several border blockades) _before_ it was invoked. The claim that it allows the government to force towing companies to tow the trucks seems exceedingly weak to me (not least because you could easily convince recalcitrant towers to overcome their reticence by offering a large cash bounty for each truck towed). I don’t know what to think about freezing protesters’ bank accounts. It strikes me as a dangerous precedent, but I’m not informed enough to know quite how drastic or unusual it is.

    I don't understand the municipal inaction. I don't understand the provincial inaction either, although I suspect that Ford was mostly sympathetic to the protesters. Given that neither level of government seemed interested in fulfilling its duties, it's possible that the Emergencies Act was necessary to compel them to act, but that's not the justification or explanation we've been given. It’s also worth noting that several provincial governments announced they were lifting most/all covid measures before the protests were broken up.

    Ultimately, I'm just left very concerned and confused. I find it worrying that police are so reticent to intervene when it's white supremacists protesting, but very eager otherwise. I find the invocation of the Emergencies Act concerning, because I don't doubt it'll be used again, and against perfectly acceptable and peaceful protests.

    Reply
  8. A Sharon

    It's my belief the blockade of the bridges, shutting off the exchange of commerce between the US and Canada, which triggered their decision to trigger the Act's invocation. Governments will tolerate a lot of disruptive protest. But, when the protests severely interfere with commerce they will do anything they can to stop it. It's made all the more sensitive by the numerous other political crises causing out of control inflation and economic loss.

    Reply
  9. MP

    This doesn’t speak to the legality of the protests, but there seems to be a lack of civil literacy among at least it’s more prominent organizers. Most of these examples have been well-noted here in Canada:

    (i) Canadian COVID restrictions are largely provincial responsibility, not federal as the protestors largely assume.

    (ii) The organizers “Memorandum of Understanding” is deeply confused about what the various levels of government in Canada are capable of.

    (iii) The Governor General has said she has been overwhelmed with protestor requests to add their names to the ‘no confidence registry’, which doesn’t exist.

    (iv) During one of the bail hearings this week, the proposed surety cited the first amendment, to which the presiding Judge rightly asked, “What do you mean, first amendment? What’s that?”.

    Etc, etc. Many of the organizers seem to be ‘sovereign citizen’ types, but with the peculiar twist of not understanding the difference between Canadian and US law. This seems worth mentioning so that people take what the protestors and their supporters are saying about the Emergency Measure's Act with a hefty grain of salt.

    Reply
  10. Benj

    "I don't understand the municipal inaction. I don't understand the provincial inaction either, although I suspect that Ford was mostly sympathetic to the protesters. Given that neither level of government seemed interested in fulfilling its duties, it's possible that the Emergencies Act was necessary to compel them to act, but that's not the justification or explanation we've been given." — I have been at least somewhat suspicious that the Feds did indeed step in once it became clear that Ontario was not going to do anything. But there is this complicating point: the Ontario Government had declared its own state of emergency (https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-declares-a-state-of-emergency-to-end-siege-in-ottawa-and-windsor-1.5777336) on 11 February, a Friday; the Federal declaration followed on the 14th, a Monday. I wonder if the levels of government had reached an agreement to each give cover to the other: that Ontario would 'break the ice' with the easy, bridge-clearing job, and then Canada would follow shortly after with the more difficult (logistically and politically) policing in Ottawa. JT seemed adamant in his desire to not start the escalation; and presumably Ford was not interested in being out on a limb. I suspect that the long delay in action may have been in part due to interest of both governments to ensure that popular opinion had solidified against the occupation, and in part due to the undoubted intricacy in the negotiation required to settle on the ultimate "after you, Alphonse" scheme.

    Reply
  11. Mike O'Brien

    I wrote a piece about this a few weeks ago, a few days before the Emergencies Act was invoked. I dare say it's a good synopsis of the situation at that point:

    https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/couldnt-happen-here-eh.html

    The short version is that stated aims of the protest-turned-siege was to force the federal government to overturn all public health orders, including those mandated by provincial, municipal, and American federal authorities, as well as to force the federal government to be dissolved and replaced by a provisional council of yahoos. They promised to remain entrenched until these (undemocratic, unconstitutional, impossible and disastrous) demands were met. That's not expression, it's extortion. And many of the actions of the occupiers were illegal under normal laws, such as blocking roadways and disturbing the peace (100+ decibel horns blaring constantly near residential areas is not "speech".)

    The Emergencies Act was (arguably) necessary in order to quickly coordinate civilian police from around the country to enforce laws in Ottawa, as the municipal and provincial authorities had demonstrated an inability and/or unwillingness to do so during the first three weeks. Any invoking of the Act automatically triggers an inquiry, in order to deter abuse and find preventative solutions to obviate its future use.

    Alt-right American propaganda is largely responsible for spawning this movement, and continues to distort the discussion of it in the media, particularly in presenting the false narrative that these people represent a majoritarian view.

    Reply
  12. Mike O'Brien

    I wrote a piece about this a few weeks ago, a few days before the Emergencies Act was invoked. I dare say it's a good synopsis of the situation at that point:

    https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/couldnt-happen-here-eh.html

    The short version is that stated aims of the protest-turned-siege was to force the federal government to overturn all public health orders, including those mandated by provincial, municipal, and American federal authorities, as well as to force the federal government to be dissolved and replaced by a provisional council of yahoos. They promised to remain entrenched until these (undemocratic, unconstitutional, impossible and disastrous) demands were met. That's not expression, it's extortion. And many of the actions of the occupiers were illegal under normal laws, such as blocking roadways and disturbing the peace (100+ decibel horns blaring constantly near residential areas is not "speech".)

    The Emergencies Act was (arguably) necessary in order to quickly coordinate civilian police from around the country to enforce laws in Ottawa, as the municipal and provincial authorities had demonstrated an inability and/or unwillingness to do so during the first three weeks. Any invoking of the Act automatically triggers an inquiry, in order to deter abuse and find preventative solutions to obviate its future use.

    Alt-right American propaganda is largely responsible for spawning this movement, and continues to distort the discussion of it in the media, particularly in presenting the false narrative that these people represent a majoritarian view.

    Reply
  13. Dean C. Rowan

    Funny, but the name that sent me over the edge was Adam Carolla, but that's because I'm familiar with his vacuous schtick. Peterson, Shapiro, and Pool? Not so much.

    As for Greenwald's endorsement, flagged by Brian, he explicitly doesn't endorse the piece, stating that "we edit and fact-check the content to ensure factual accuracy, but our publication of an article or op-ed does not necessarily mean we agree with all or even any of the views expressed by the writer, who is guaranteed editorial freedom here."

    Recognizing that this post is not an assessment of the worthiness of Greenwald or his associates, I nevertheless sense that guilt by association is often and mistakenly the criterion applied to disputes like this one about Canada.

    BL: Greenwald only publishes stuff he is sympathetic to, the disclaimer notwithstanding. "Guilt by association" is a correct inference in many contexts!

    Reply
  14. Michel Xhignesse

    Benj,

    That does indeed seem very plausible!

    Reply
  15. Josh

    To me (an American living in Western Canada), the most interesting thing about the response was how clearly it manifested the class divisions/alignments in contemporary Western democracies–especially when compared to the summer 2020 protests. Political elites, capital and PMCs (incl. culture-makers like media, universities, etc.) all in lockstep in both cases, but especially this time with the rather obviously totalitarian collusion of state power and the banking sector.

    Not an evaluative judgment, but interesting for understanding what ruling classes view as threatening.

    Reply
  16. Jonathan Surovell

    On the question whether this was a national emergency, we might start by hearing out Peter Sloly, who was Ottawa's Chief of Police at the start of the occupation. He claimed that the threat of widespread violence in Ottawa put the situation beyond the control of Ottawa police and, in fact, might make military involvement necessary. I would argue that this was a reasonable view when Sloly expressed it and remained so as further evidence emerged over subsequent weeks.

    1. As has been noted above, the convoy's most official website called for the overthrow of the government. This view was in line with the organizers' long-standing views. (Perhaps less directly relevant to the question of whether this was a national emergency, but important context: organizers included Bauder (QAnon), LaFace (nativist social media posts, likely member of white supremacist group Soldiers of Odin), Barber (Confederate flags hanging in garage), Action 4 Canada ("all manifestatiosn of Islam should be banned from the West"), Patrick King (concern for the "Anglo-Saxon bloodline," COVID-19 policy questions will ultimately be "solved with bullets"), etc. The most moderate organizer had merely worked to get Alberta to separate from Canada and join Trump's America.)

    2. There was violence, early on, at the Coutts, Alberta border blockade (which was part of the same movement)–someone drove their vehicle through an RCMP barrier. Police Chief Sloly referenced this when he claimed that attempting to enforce the law in Ottawa could provoke widespread violence and that the military might therefore be needed.
    https://twitter.com/davidreevely/status/1488958601284792321
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/02/truck-convoy-blockade-canada-covid

    3. There were reports, early on, of guns being "brought into the protest."
    https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/refile-anti-vaccine-mandate-protesters-say-they-will-block-ottawa-long-necessary-2022-02-02/

    4. On more than one occasion, occupiers swarmed police attempting to enforce the law. According to police, there was at least one "near-riot." This might help explain police's hands-off approach (though I doubt it was the only factor).
    https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/protesters-quickly-adapting-to-police-measures-ottawa-chief-1.5770548

    5. Also at the Coutts blockade, police found a cache of long guns ammo, and machetes, in the same vehicles as symbols of extremist group Diagolon (the Canadian equivalent of Buggaloo Bois, as far as I understand it) and a list of names of police officers. Police charged 4 people with conspiracy to commit murder.
    https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/15/four-facing-conspiracy-to-commit-murder-charges-as-coutts-alta-border-blockade-ends.html

    6. At the blockade in Surrey, BC, occupiers drove through an RCMP line in a "military-style vehicle" and assaulted police.
    https://bc.ctvnews.ca/surrey-rcmp-investigating-alleged-assaults-on-officers-motor-vehicle-violations-in-border-clash-1.5779998

    7. Occupiers were "swearing themselves in" as "officers of the peace," seemingly intent on establishing a parallel law enforcement system within the area they controlled.
    https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1491904582137663490

    8. The higher-ups of the occupation included ex-intelligence and ex-RCMP. The latter made an appeal to veterans, specifically, to join the occupation.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/world/canada/organizers-call-for-protests-to-become-too-large-for-police-to-break-up.html

    9. Various other illegal tactics were used, in a systematic way, against law enforcement, Ottawa residents, and hospitals: bomb threats, rocks thrown at emergency vehicles, a huge wave of harassment (including a gang of adults in BC that organized a trip to a school to harass teenagers with crude insults and at least one racial slur), overhelming 911 lines with prank calls, the noise torture mentioned above, and no doubt other things I'm forgetting.
    https://bc.ctvnews.ca/anti-mandate-protester-targets-students-outside-b-c-high-school-in-racist-tirade-1.5783587

    10. Influencers in the occupation were using dangerously inflammatory rhetoric reminiscent of that used by Mo Brooks on January 6th. For example, Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament, said to a crowd that this would be the Hill they'd die on, just as pas generations of Canadians had died in historic battles. He tweeted that Canada had undergone a coup d'etat, it was now a police state, and protesters should gather together to stop police from "stealing" their fuel.

    So it looked to me like a nation-wide insurgency by extremists using a variety of illegal, harmful, and, in some cases, violent methods. And that seems like a national emergency to me. That's also my read on how the Canadian experts on security and extremism I was following (Regina Bateson, Stephanie Carvin, Michael Kempa, Thomas Juneau, and others) saw it.

    Whether the Emergency Act was appropriate or constitutional I can't say.

    I suspect that the most significant aspect of this, long-term, is that the Conservative Party of Canada chose to support the convoy/occupation. It has thereby radicalized itself and its base. Pierre Poilievre, the favorite to win CPC leadership, was one of the most vocal supporters of the occupation–that is, of an attempt, by extremists of various stripes, to overthrow the government, using an array of illegal methods. This suggests a complete lack of commitment to democratic norms and possibly, even, to the law.

    As for Glenn Greenwald, his commentary on the occupation was exactly what I predicted based on Tucker Carlson's support for it: Greenwald was anti-anti-occupation.

    Reply
  17. djp

    I found this discussion of the law itself interesting:

    https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/02/law-bytes-podcast-episode-118/

    Reply
  18. Another Josh

    An interesting analysis is provided here: https://ablawg.ca/2022/02/17/covid-19-and-the-emergencies-act-canada-redux/#more-12495

    Reply
  19. Joe

    Legal issues aside, I'm surprised that we are 15 comments in and no-one has even attempted to sympathetically engage with the motivations and beliefs of a huge chunk of the protesters, which have been extensively documented in several places and which are apparently nowhere near as dire or horrific as many commenters are suggesting above (see https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want). Doubtless there are bad people in the movement, some of them seem to have appointed themselves "leadership" and made silly demands, and in particular it is correct to say that their targeting of ordinary civilians with noise was a terrible moral error (though again, we have to ask the question we asked during the BLM riots: how *many* were responsible for all of this?). But yes, no-one should be under the illusion that this is a gang of flower children politely linking arms, there were indeed some serious issues with a lot of these protests. Absolutely.

    But are we really to believe that there is, right now, *no* good sense or justification in a large and diverse movement which opposes very stringent (and sometimes apparently questionable) vaccination mandates placed upon a large number of primarily working class people, many of whom incidentally have generally worked like dogs to keep the weakening supply chain going while we comfy middle/upper-mid-class academics have been teaching on Zoom in our pyjamas and ordering from Grubhub? We academics who apparently want to tarnish them all with the label "white supremacists" as a way of justifying the most significant deployment of Canadian state power against its own citizens since the Second World War? To use a phrase aptly deployed on this blog, are we not in some danger of becoming the "official mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class"?

    Maybe the Emergencies act was ultimately justified, legally and morally, but we will not win over anyone to that position by just summarily dismissing or ignoring all of these concerns, and we will invite wholly justified suspicion if we refuse to acknowledge the complexity here, and just repeat Twitter talking points about swastikas and cherry-pick examples of bad behaviour.

    Reply
  20. LS

    Senator Paula Simons, who is from Alberta, details a number of provincial and federal security issues associated with the protests. She is also quite hesitant about the invocation of the Emergencies Act. You can listen to her speech here:

    It seems pretty clear to me the national security issue that triggered the Act was the border closures (at key crossings across the length of the border) and not the Ottawa protest. The stock of arms at the Coutts crossing raised serious concerns about what armaments might be waiting at other crossings and so made clearing the blockades of the border a more complex operation. It is noteworthy that Trudeau has now ended the use of the Emergencies Act. That does not mean it was the right thing to do. But it is a different question than that posed by focusing on the protest in Ottawa.

    I might also add that almost 85% of eligible Canadians (ie older than 5) are vaccinated with 2 doses. And almost 90% have at least one dose. Vaccine hesitancy in Canada looks very different than in the US. https://covid19tracker.ca/vaccinationtracker.html

    Reply
  21. Jonathan Surovell

    I agree that it would be a mistake to dismiss everyone involved as a white supremacist. It is important to understand the motivations of the rank-and-file. But, respectfully, I think the rest of your remarks are more apt to engender misunderstanding.

    – To suggest that the organizers, who controlled the funding, communications, websites, tactical decisions, and negotiations with the mayor, and who had the big social media followings, were ordinary participants who "appointed themselves 'leadership'" out of nowhere is misleading. They were real leaders in all the respects in which one could be a leader of a movement.

    – Once it's acknowledged that the event had real leaders, the question of the dynamics between the leaders and the rank-and-file becomes an important one. The organizers, who had been planning convoys since before COVID-19 existed, used COVID-19 policy as a tool to draw a bigger audience than their Memorandum of Understanding would have been able to do alone. All far-right movements are now using COVID-inspired angst for recruitment. Last I checked, Bannon's podcast, which is called "WAR ROOM PANDEMIC," is about half election conspiracism and half COVID conspiracism. Same for Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, etc. There's been plenty of research on this, for example:

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/far-right-using-covid-19-theories-to-grow-reach-study-shows

    Adolph Reed's article, "The Whole Country is a Reichstag" has some good discussion of the far-right's use of anti-vaxxism against the Biden administration. This is the same phenomenon.

    https://nonsite.org/the-whole-country-is-the-reichstag/

    I should also mention that the latest right-wing talking point in Canada is that vaccine mandates and other COVID policies contribute to the current extremism problem (or "division"). This is a hypothesis worth investigating, though none of the research I've seen addresses it. The US, including states with the fewest COVID restrictions, have plenty of extremists using anti-vaxxism for recruitment.

    – The decision to torture residents with noise wasn't an "error," it was a considered choice. The injunction against it gave them an off-ramp but they chose to continue. The most extreme and openly racist leader, Patrick King, who has an especially large following within the movement, gloated about how they'd kept residents up for ten days (at the time) with their honking. His audience reacted with laughing emojis. (He was also invited on stage at one of the week-end concerts and one of the biggest crowds of the entire occupation cheered enthusiastivelly for him.)

    – You say this is a "large and diverse movement." Do you have evidence of that? I've watched a lot of videos of it and I almost never see non-white people. Of course, right-wing pundits have been cherry-picking non-white people. But just look at a video that doesn't curate its subjects.

    – We don't have many data on the participants. But we do know that the organizers are Christian nationalists and white nationalists. And according to EKOS polling, people who support the convoy are three times more likely than people who oppose it to think there are "too many visible minorities coming to Canada," 43% vs. 15%.

    https://twitter.com/VoiceOfFranky/status/1495226580653727750

    The percentage of *participants* in the occupation who feel this way is surely higher than the percentage of supporters, though presumably lower than the percentage of leaders (which I would estimate to be 100%). (Why? Well, some of the invited speakers were neo-Nazis, there were extremist merch tables, etc. Those who are comfortable in that environment skew a certain way.) I hope someone studies, a la Robert Pape, how much participation is explained by belief in the replacement theory. At this point, we don't know.

    https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/americas_insurrectionists_online_2021_04_06.pdf?mtime=1617807009

    Reply
  22. Nick

    Joe, maybe nobody commented on that issue because Brian wasn't asking about it. Most of the comments have stuck to the question he asked. FWIW my impression is that you are mistaken about vax mandates, in Canada, falling mainly on working class people. I think most universities (and schools) and tons of white collar offices (not to mention the entire federal civil service) have a vax mandate, that is, vaccination is a condition of employment. This is quite different from the situation with truckers; they were not required to be vaccinated. They were just no longer exempt, when doing cross-border runs, from the requirements that applied to any other Canadian entering the country by land (atm, be vaxxed or quarantine). They were free to continue working as truckers, just on routes that didn't involve cross-border travel. I don't doubt that this was a disruptive requirement for some of them, but it's not remotely as strong as the requirements that fell on professors or health care workers or teachers or civil servants. And hey, pandemics are disruptive. None of us gets to do everything we want, whenever we want, however we want.

    There's a legitimate question, of course, of whether vax mandates are justified, when they are, why they are, and so on, and reasonable people can disagree. Unfortunately this group of protestors seemed incapable of articulating the anti-mandate argument beyond one sentence shouts about 'freedom', and only spoke the language of force.

    On Brian's original question: I am in Ottawa and my impression is that the protestors who stuck around for a few weeks were, by and large, pretty horrible. They didn't target the government, they targeted the people living in the residential neighbourhood that immediately abuts the Parliament. Imagine a transport truck parked outside your house blowing its horn nearly 24 hours a day. That's what it was like. I live 1.5 miles in a straight line from Parliament and I could hear the horns inside my house. I have no idea how people living in the immediately vicinity restrained themselves. It is also difficult for me to imagine being aggrieved enough at a gov't policy that I decide to make random strangers, who have nothing whatsoever to do with my grievance and who are powerless to change it, utterly miserable in the hope that will cause the gov't to relent.

    A final comment about the article Joe posted: It was published Feb 10, and in it the journalist says she has spent 10 days walking around interviewing truckers. But it mostly just reprints and amplifies an article she published Jan 31, which focused on the first weekend of the protest, which was larger and had more normal, non-crazy people in it. The hack self-plagiarism comes through in places, such as when she says in the Feb 10th article that the protesters number 8000-10,000 ("They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed"), whereas that number was only every reached on the first Saturday of the protest, Jan 29th (as she put it in the article at the time, "Some estimates place the number of people on Saturday between 8,000 and 10,000). It's either very sloppy, or very dishonest, to make it seem as if the ongoing, weeks-long, problematic protest had 8000-10,000 participants. Either way, it shows a disregard for the truth that makes it hard to take her seriously as a journalist. Similarly, in her 10 days walking around she apparently managed to find a few non-white protesters, but instead of making clear they were a tiny minority, she paints it as the rainbow coalition of the north. It's difficult to believe she approached the situation with a genuine interest in understanding and reporting what she found, rather than as somehow who had her thesis before she arrived.

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  23. Eddie

    I am a Canadian with a JD (though not practising).

    The Emergencies Act (s. 3) defines "a national emergency" as "an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that (a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or (b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada, and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada."

    I'm not sure how the courts will interpret this legislation–it has never been invoked before so there is no relevant jurisprudence. But I will make a couple observations about whether this standard was met in the case of the Ottawa protests.

    The first thing to point out is that, as Jonathan Kay has reported, "when police actually did decide to expel the protesters last week (arresting more than 170 in the process), the operation consisted of nothing more than a conventional riot-control operation. Emergencies Act or not, the police could have executed the same operation last week." Similarly, the protests along the Canada-US border, which some ha speculated instigated the invocation of the Emergencies Act in the first place, were cleared by police prior to that invocation. The requirement that the emergency "cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada" (which applies to both (a) and (b)) appears to not be met.

    It appears, so far, that the legislation was used to freeze the bank accounts of some individuals associated with the protests, and possibly also to seize the property of some of those associated with the protests. Given that these actions were not necessary to end the protests themselves, it would appear that either the protests did not constitute "a national emergency" or that it was not the protests themselves that the Trudeau government took to constitute the "national emergency."

    One of the organizers who was arrested (for mischief) after the invocation of the Emergencies Act, Tamara Lich, was denied bail in part because the judge (Justice Bourgeois!) believed she was likely to commit additional criminal offenses. Another one of the arrested organizers was granted bail on the condition that he return to his home and cease all organizing. This suggests that the Crown prosecutors–who work on behalf of the federal government–are concerned about further protests and perhaps the movement (if it can be called that) behind these protests.

    If that's the case, then it would seem that the legality of invoking this law turns on the facts on the ground: Do these protests, or does this movement, "seriously endanger[] the lives, health or safety of Canadians" or "seriously threaten[] the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada"?

    If you're the sort of person who thinks that newspapers generally report the relevant facts, then I would suspect you would answer yes to the above. However, courts generally have much higher standards of evidence than do journalists or social media companies. My guess is that the federal government is going to lose in court. Despite all the noise, there is literally zero evidence of injuries or threats of injuries to any persons or property emanating from this protest. (This discussion of the protests is limited to the time prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Police action after that point did result in some violent altercations between police and protesters, and some of the arrests made were for assault.) As far as I know, the only arrests the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) made, and the only criminal investigations that were ongoing (again, prior to the Emergencies Act being used), were for non-violent property offenses (mainly mischief, trespassing, and other traffic violations), and for hate crimes.

    Lets be honest: No one is really concerned about the property offenses; in any case, it would be difficult to argue these offenses alone could meet the standard for "a national emergency" as defined in the Emergencies Act. The concern is clearly about the hate crimes. So far, beyond the OPS telling us that they are investigating and charging people with hate crimes, we don't know the nature of the allegations. I suspect these charges are overblown (as is typical of police in every case as a bargaining tactic for reaching plea agreements; and as is typical of police action during protests)–in part because if there were so many instances of hate speech at this protest, surely one of those incidents would have been filmed and would have gone viral by now. In any case, if invoking the Emergencies Act was to be justified by reference to the alleged criminal acts of the protesters, then it appears that we don't yet have enough evidence to say whether it was justified.

    It has also been said that the organizers wanted to "overthrow" the Canadian government. I didn't read whatever the original proposal was that this claim comes from. From my understanding it was a "demand" and not a "plan". (I can't say for sure, but on the face of it this is not necessarily "anti-democratic". Federal Members of Parliment can issue a "non-confidence vote" against the governing party, triggering an election. If members of the public are entitled to make a case for the impeachment of a US President, I'm not sure what the problem is here.) For whatever it's worth, the organizers retracted it, and then put out a series of statements to clarify their goals/demands. Part of the reason the newspaper-reading public was so misled about this was because nobody in the federal government, or in the mainstream Canadian press, was willing to interview or speak with any of the organizers.

    Much of the discourse around these protests, especially the one in Ottawa, focused on the presence of "hate symbols", the "hateful language" used by some of the organizers, and incidents of alleged hate crimes at the protests. The protest in Ottawa was described by politicians, police, and media figures in Canada as an "insurrection" (invoking a comparison with the January 6th riot) and an "occupation" (invoking military terminology). Anti-terrorism laws are being used to investigate and prosecute individuals involved with the protest. I personally spoke with a number of people who attended the Ottawa protest. Everybody there seemed to be pretty confused about where all this rhetoric came from. It appears to based on one person who waved a Nazi flag alongside a Canadian flag (who was trying to say that the Canadian government was acting like Nazis), and another person who was waving a Confederate flag, because, he claimed, "it's the only flag I own." The "desecration" of the Terry Fox statue amounted to having a Canadian flag draped upside down on it, and having some anti-vax/anti-mandate literature posted on it. At least one of the "incidents" of hate speech, as publicized by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, turned out to be a fraud.

    So it doesn't look like there there is any solid evidence of this being a mass movement/protest focused on white supremacy, hatred, overthrowing the Canadian government, etc. Rather, what evidence there is for this comes from a couple misinterpreted flags, a few dozen hate crime investigations, and a few comments made by three of the organizers. Some people are comfortable to conclude that these facts taint the movement/protest as a whole. (I find this reasoning unconvincing. There was no shortage of conservative public figures ready to condemn the BLM protests because of the violent/criminal actions on the part of some attending the protests, and because of the anti-capitalist rhetoric of some of the organization's leaders. The merits of the respective causes is immaterial; we're only considering to what extent a protest movement, as a whole, should be condemned because of the actions of some of its supporters and leaders.)

    Given the lack of solid evidence of any public danger, and given how generally protective Canadian courts are of the right to protest, my guess is that they will find that the facts on the ground did not meet the definition of "a national emergency" under the Emergencies Act.

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  24. Johnny Eh McDonald

    To follow up on Joe's post above, there's a shocking amount of misinformation posted here by seemingly educated people about what the supermajority of these protesters were actually on about and what the authorities did in response. Given all the hyperbole about the protesters' supposed attempts to overthrow Canadian democracy, to catalyze large-scale civil unrest, etc., to use "illegal tactics, in a systematic way", and about "the threat of widespread violence," why did the government merely seek to charge the lion's share of the ones in Ottawa with (at most) interfering with the residents' use and enjoyment of their property (i.e., because of horn honking tat night and blocking city roads), i.e., Mischief To Property? https://www.ottawapolice.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=1bc1b5ab-51e3-4860-8937-b181d4475989&lang=en
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/18/trucker-convoy-protest-canada-ottawa-police-arrests-latest-news

    If you think that the honking amounts to TORTURE, there are laws with more bite than a mischief charge…

    It's also false that they're alt/far-right and/or anti-vaxxers – especially the large, conspicuous Quebequois contingent. There were also only a very small number of people with offensive flags – though that number rises sharply depending upon one's view of the Fleurdelisé… (Think the French "desecrated" the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier because they're alt right, or because they remember their provincial history?)

    One of the protest's catalysts concerned vaccination requirements vis-a-vis CROSS BORDER transportation. This, even though something like 90% of Canadian truckers were already vaccinated. (Why do you think they chose to block the international border points, eh?) So MP's post above about their failing to understand the respective competencies of the different levels of government is ironic.

    I would specifically like to know how the protesters' bouncy castles were going to be employed in furtherance of the "nation-wide insurgency" effort. Further, were their children eventually be used as suicide bombers? As human shields? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/childrens-aid-society-ottawa-protests-1.6358882

    What also hasn't been discussed here thus far is how the federal government is now actually implementing much of what the protesters were calling for anyway…

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  25. Michel Xhignesse

    Jonathan and Nick have already addressed the other issues, so I want to address this one, which should not be allowed to stand, lest non-Canadian readers think it accurate: this is absolutely _in no way_ "the most significant deployment of Canadian state power against its own citizens since the Second World War".

    The obvious frontrunner for that status for anyone who knows their recent Canadian history is the Oka Crisis of 1990. The Indigenous people running a bridge blockade were besieged by government forces, with no food allowed in. When the women and children retreated, white citizens stoned them. The army was called in and ordered to fire on them, _and a soldier stabbed a little girl in the chest with his bayonet_. Even the UN got involved.

    Second-place probably goes to the October Crisis of 1970, which saw the invocation of the War Measures Act (the Emergencies Act's predecessor, which gave the government _even more_ power) in response to the kidnapping of a journalist and the British ambassador by separatist terrorists. The military was deployed in Québec and Ottawa. Anyone who remembers their Canadian history course in high school will remember photos of tanks outside the parliament buildings.

    Frankly, I wouldn't even rate this third. It's somewhere way far behind the state response to the G20 protests in Toronto, which were much larger (so was the police presence: over 20 000 police and military personnel) and saw much more egregious breaches of Canadians' charter rights, on far less justifiable grounds.

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  26. Andrew Sepielli

    "…interesting for understanding what ruling classes view as threatening."

    I'm curious to hear more about why you think this.

    Seems to me it's mostly that people, "ruling class" and otherwise, are just royally pissed off at the protests, not that they view them or their message as "threatening" — least of all threatening to their interests as members of a social class. (Don't get me wrong — there's a danger in being overly influenced by one's pissedoffedness, and I think we are seeing some of that manifested.)

    FWIW, I'm also an American living in Canada.

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  27. MP

    "One of the protest's catalysts concerned vaccination requirements vis-a-vis CROSS BORDER transportation. This, even though something like 90% of Canadian truckers were already vaccinated. (Why do you think they chose to block the international border points, eh?) So MP's post above about their failing to understand the respective competencies of the different levels of government is ironic."

    The irony I see is that Canadian truckers have to be vaccinated to enter the US in the first place, per *US law*. Since they couldn’t enter the US without being vaccinated, it's hard to see how the equivalent Canadian requirement when coming back is really a catalyst for the protest.

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  28. Jonathan Surovell

    The fallacy implicit in this argument, as a response to what's been said here, is so common, so inextricably bound up with defenses of the occupation, that it's worth stating it explicitly. From the start, it was the CPC's justification for meeting with the convoy organizers and since then, it's been the central point of almost every editorial by a right-wing pundit (Jonathan Kay, Rupa Subramanya, etc.). The fallacy deserves a name but I'm bad at coming up with those. Whatever we want to call it, the fallacy is:

    A majority of participants in the occupation/blockades don't have extreme ideology or goal X.
    Therefore, the claim about the organizers having ideology or goal X is false/hyperbolic/unfair/etc.

    The premises of arguments of this form are generally unsupported by evidence. But the bigger problem is that the inference is invalid. It's changing the subject. But we shouldn't change the subject like this, not if we want to understand what's going on. The ideology and goals of leaders of a movement are important to understanding its social and political significance, for obvious reasons.

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