Vocal Voices

The thousands of truck drivers who have gone to Ottowa and brought it to a standstill.
Mr Trudeau has gone into hiding, but has now invoked emergency powers which were designed to be invoked in the case of war.
Trudeau’s government has declared that banks are allowed to freeze personal and business accounts on the mere suspicion of involvement with the protest, without obtaining a court order.
They cannot be sued for such actions. Police, intelligence agencies and banks are authorised to share 'relevant information'. Banks are now required to report financial relationships of persons involved in the protests to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
The Act also allows the government to force businesses (such as tow trucks) to provide services against their will, to ban public assembly and travel, to forbid the use of a specific property, and to secure specific areas. Its implementation was opposed by four provincial premiers.

So now then.
I have been banging on about authhoritarianism and the Chinese social credit system for long enough; apologies if I have bored anyone.
Well, here it is.
Because freezing people's bank accounts and forbidding people to travel is exactly what the communists in China do when you haven't been a good citizen, when you haven't done what you are told.
And here we are in a "liberal democracy", spying on ordinary citizens, freezing their bank accounts, forbidding them to travel, etc etc.
Scratch a liberal and find a fascist, very true saying.

It's worth bearing in mind that the protests were all about the "Vaccine mandate" (passport) which you have to have to conduct your daily life. Vaccine passports were never about the vaccine, they are all about government control, and Canada is the living proof.
The message is plain: participation in normal life is a privilege, not a default. Only those 'in compliance' get to participate.

Canadians don’t want participation in normal life to become a privilege granted only on government say-so. That’s what these protests are about. But their goal will not be secured until the vaccine passport system is gone.
And the last bit applies to us too. You might think that we have dropped the vaccine passport but we haven't; and our government have no intention of dropping it, imo.

I work with a lot of Canadians every day and the abiding viewpoint is "just shut up and get on with it". There isn't a lot of sympathy amongst the middle ranks of Canada.

What is the issue here? They have to have a vaccination and get a certificate (which can be physical rather than digital), in order to carry on leisure activities? Perhaps they're not being allowed to travel all over the country spreading the virus (if not vaccinated)? This is bad how?

Now as to the powers they are using. I was against the knee jerk reaction to 9/11 and the huge swathes of power the government grabbed at that time. It is these "emergency" powers being used now. They exist in the UK too and have done since our own knee jerk reaction. So we let them create these powers and when a segment of society decides to hold the rest to ransom, so they can get what they want, these powers are taken out, dusted off and used.

Goes back to "don't do knee jerk regulations". LIke the banning of hand guns after Dunblane which flooded the criminal underworld with unregistered guns. Now people get shot on a weekly basis.

As for the situation in Canada, I had a situation related to me by my daughter. A local in her small isolated town wasn't up for all these masks and restrictions, etc and (in 2020 I believe), decided to go on a skiing holiday. Off he went, had a fine old time as if nothing was wrong, flew back and booked a 1 hr taxi ride from a local taxi driver. The local came out, drove him back for 1h. It turned out he had Covid. He survived fine, the taxi driver with a wife and two young children died. As I understand it this person who didn't believe in all this protection and vaccination and certificates, is now finding it nearly impossible to continue living in his small local community.

I don't like it, but I stay out of the way of the virus, take the vaccinations and have the certificates, both physical and digital. I don't track though.

Now as for those rules being used against these truckers being like China. Canada is a Federal parliamentary democracy with elections every 4 years or earlier if there is a snap election. Justin Trudeau is the leader of the Liberal party. Sound odd, the Liberals taking this kind of action? Not to me, they've always had this "we know best and will make you do it" attitude imo.

Trudeau won a snap election in September 2021. This means he has up to 3.5 more years as PM. Their party won the second largest % of votes (largest was conservative), but they won more seats.

Now come 2025, how do you think the truckers are going to vote? Conservative I'd guess. Or they could vote for one of several other parties, but the Cons is their beset chance of unseating the Liberals.

In China if the Chinese don't like what the Communist party is doing, come the next election they can vote for? Yep, the Communist party. The Liberal Democracies are nothing like China even if they use some of the powers that China applies regularly. Trudeau only did this because he had just won an election and Covid has been classified as an emergency. He is hoping that his core voters don't believe in the freedoms the truckers want and that they'll vote for him again next time. He's also hoping that people who do sympathise with the truckers will have forgotten by the next election.

In the end the truckers are wrong. Democracy is not something you hold to ransom because you don't like what is going on. If you are really pissed with the government and want change, you create small disruptions, regularly but not enough to really annoy the people, enough to keep it in everyone's mind, until the next election. Then you run an information campaign on the government and get them unseated. The message is clear for the next time, "mess with us and we'll beat you at your own game, pushing you out of power".

Something IB could stand to learn.