Zeitgeist

At some point Canada became the most extreme example of all the dystopian experiments we used to mock in parts of Europe: the most permissive euthanasia, the most permissive hard drug tolerance, the most permissive abortion laws, the most permissive gender surgery laws, the making illegal and “against human rights” of anyone who questions these radical and reckless policies. Our compelled speech laws and banning of unpleasant protests are especially Orwellian. Canada is becoming a dystopia.

Actually a lot of Blacks and other “non-Black racialized” people roll their eyes at the woke victim point scheme. Don’t think for a second that racial groups line up along political lines with Blacks always on the left. Far from it. It’s like the myth that all Blacks want to defund the police. That’s a lot of white liberal saviour BS.

One flag meaning what, that Trudeau is acting like Hitler? You’re playing Trudeau’s manipulative game. Seize on the flag and say the protesters “are walking with the Nazis”. Pathetic

Bullshit

Trudeau should resign over this. He was an incompetent leader, unable to bring the right tools to bring the temperature down. Instead of reaching out with empathy and meeting with protest leaders he insulted them, painted thousands of protesters with the extremist brush, hid, and brought in the maximum domestic emergency powers available. The claims against the protesters were exaggerated or outright lies. Charter rights were trounced. The whole mess is on the Liberal government. Freeland was no better. She revelled in the freezing of bank accounts, removal of licenses, and seizure of vehicles.

The blockades were mostly cleared and the honking had mostly stopped when the EA was declared. You need to stop. I’m starting to think you’re a fake here on behalf of the Liberals.

You set no statute of limitations on the injustices of the distant past and pretend that they persist today to an extent that people are still widely held back because of skin colour and ethnicity. Given all the current examples of “building representation” through hiring and the attempts by management programs to see racism lurking everywhere, I just don’t believe the hype. The only codified discrimination today is in racialized job postings or EDI point schemes that determine what someone deserves based on superficial markers or intersectionalities. I understand what the initial intent of these programs was, but we’ve just created more discrimination. We’re creating new forms of victim-state-dependents whom government can save. I know that people’s views about such programs depend very much on their politics and how interventionist they believe government should be. I find it sadly ironic that the non-Indigenous who are most critical of Canada’s creation of residential schools tend to have the kinds of interventionist political views that create paternalistic institutions like residential schools. There’s an inability to connect that impulse across time. I really see it now. It’s the willful blindness of the elites. It’s the one-eyed Horus trying to control everything but missing the importance of freedom and self-determination. The Covid measures demonstrate the same need to control how people live and think. It’s happening with the internet too. Government needs to back off because the authorities can’t help but create new forms of oppression over and over. It’s why I’m for small government and stronger individual rights. Racism is no longer systemic in Canada in the sense of policy. Attitudes persist but creating new forms of discrimination to counter old ones isn’t going to improve people’s attitudes.

They can lie to justify suspending rights then simply apologize later. Oops

You keep comparing the Freedom Convoy to January 6. My other point is that even if you call this an occupation, the use of martial law was unwarranted. It was a form of martial law or War Measures, basically a suspension of rights so law enforcement could do as it saw fit to remove protests that were arbitrarily declared illegal.

In Canada you are free to harm yourself in many different ways, from MAID for minors and the mentally ill to free needles in Vancouver where all drugs are legal for consumption. You’re free to abort up to the day of birth and free to seek a sex change without parental consent. However, you’re not free to protest government rules or to say what you think if the CRTC deems it harmful. You’re not free to have medical discretion over your own medical treatment and you may be locked into a care home barred from visitations for your safety. Your donations to a political cause counter to government policy may be seized and your bank accounts frozen. You can be denigrated and canceled by your government and media for having opinions that run counter to government policy. If you buy giant fake breasts and flaunt them in front of students mandated to attend your class, government and police will protect you. Canada is increasingly twisted, depraved, and totalitarian.

Yup, and when normal people doing harmless things can be treated so harshly by government and media, you know we’re in trouble.

So? Does that warrant martial law? Does it warrant character assassinations and freezing of bank accounts? Occupy Wall Street and the BLM occupation in Portland was tolerated. Buildings were burned down and people assaulted during the BLM protests and most people basically accepted this rage and listened patiently to the cries to defund the police. The learning from government’s response to the Freedom Convoy is that government can impose and maintain drastic measures and put down opposition to those measures without so much as an explanation or compromise.

Doesn’t matter. Trudeau started the overreach and Biden returned the favour.

Canada imposed it on truckers in January and the Americans followed suit.

Canada’s border is federal jurisdiction.

I can’t stomach your ignorance and denial. You’re right, there have never been violent protests or protests with vandalism in Canada (sarcasm).

Dougie is about 90% correct in my opinion. I have a different take on Hegel because I studied him and know how Marx corrupted his ideas. Otherwise Dougie is describing the totalitarian creep that has taken hold in Canada. I think it’s the result of a mixture of naïveté before international ideologues and the rise of Chinese surveillance totalitarian capitalism, the rise of the influence of A.I. data driven management, identity politics, Trudeau’s narcissistic need to appear virtuous (despite his hypocrisy and removal/denigrating of opposition), and the blunt, slow-moving instruments used to solve perceived “crises”. Our weak constitutional protections simply caved under these forces. A different leader could do things quite differently, but the fact that Trudeau could act so arbitrarily and impose the E.A. so unaccountably tells us how weak our “democracy” really is.

Again, that’s why we’re supposed to have Charter protections of rights, but we’ve learned that those are pretty suggestions, easily ignored by governments and swept away by the courts without much reason. The media always complies because rocking boats might prevent the government grants from flowing.

Not really. Some truckers are independent, which means that they own their own rigs and contract out to companies. They can give up jobs and money to support a cause. You really don’t account for the large number of protesters who were vaccinated and were not truckers but saw the arbitrariness and overreach. I attended the protests one day and what I saw was a total contradiction of what was presented by CBC and CTV. It was multi-racial, peaceful, festive, and many of the protesters were people I’d consider left-leaning on abortion. “My body, my choice” signs were everywhere. Farmers were there. Civil liberties groups, Eastern Europeans, and intellectuals were there talking feverishly. Many people commented on the atmosphere feeling like communist crackdowns in former Eastern Block countries. Also, people often did have to compromise because they have mouths to feed and can’t afford to lose their jobs. The government put people under immense pressure to comply with unnecessary mandates. Your take on the protests is quite superficial. I also laugh when I hear how Ottawans were inconvenienced when I think about the violence and vandalizing protests we’ve seen among other activist groups in the past. The fact that Trudeau didn’t meet with them and disparaged them, painting them as white supremacists and misogynists with “unacceptable views” was so divisive. I don’t care what you moral cowards think anymore. I see you as the reason why totalitarianism takes hold. It’s the “I was following orders” mentality. Wimpville.

You’re either pretending to be stupid or you really are ignorant. Groot is making the irrefutable point that abuse knows no racial or ethnic bounds, even if for periods of time it was more prevalent in the treatment of members of some groups than others. My mother (white) can recount endless episodes from her school days of kids being shamed and hit by adults. In many cases then it was considered normal discipline. This is the problem of judging the people of yesterday with the lenses of today. Applying evidence of historic wrongdoing (by today’s standards) to people coming to Canada today who face no legal or policy discrimination, and simply assuming they are victims in need of assistance, as though they are incompetent, is paternalistic and actually racist. Every person is different and every situation is unique. Lumping people together and making assumptions about their level of oppression or victimhood based on superficial traits like skin colour is simply another iteration of racist oversimplified categorization. I know it’s often done today with the intent of helping people, but it causes new forms of oppression. The founders of residential schools genuinely thought they were helping, and there was good work and bad, but don’t kid yourself, our generation will be judged as ignorant and unjust by future generations. That’s why I’m circumspect about government programs designed to help certain groups. New inequities are created and getting it wrong is almost inevitable. In the end, you are what you create, not what is handed to you, even though we’re all handed something and we try to give the less fortunate a leg up because it’s good to help.

The vax mandate on truckers was federal.

Canada’s constitution has proven to be weak, with too many means of suspending rights, which are fewer than the Americans have, especially when it comes to property and free speech. The compelled speech law in Canada, the imposition of the Emergencies Act to circumvent due process and basically give police a free pass to beat up protesters and designate areas no-go zones where rights don’t exist, the grotesque pride of a government that maintains unnecessary mandates and backstops them with violence… There’s so much more I can say here. I remember people on this forum literally being afraid to criticize government because they thought Canada had become totalitarian. With the freezing of bank accounts, government smearing of a large chunk of the population, and imposition of digital vax passes (ArriveCAN), yes there’s much government overreach and totalitarian behaviour here. I don’t know how anyone can give all this a pass. It’s hard not to see blind idiocy, yet the media headlines generally supported the government, and the population follows suit. The inquiry is weighted in Liberal favour by its members. Again though, there’s too much complaisance and uncritical thinking to correct course. The Conservatives are always at risk of imitating the Liberals. That’s why I’m looking at property in the US and renewing my British passport. Canada is a loony left quasi-dictatorship. Take Cuba and add Disney identity politics activism and you get an approximation.

Many truckers and protesters were vaccinated. It’s about our rights and stopping government overreach. I’ve been on the other side of the argument and weighed both sides. You don’t remove critical rights and compromise so many people’s livelihoods and mental health to fight a disease for which, by February, people had many means of protecting themselves. Never again, or rather, if this is the way of Canada’s future, I want out.

You don’t know that the trucker mandates were federal. ExFlyer, I don’t know what you’re trying to do defending the Trudeau government and downplaying what happened. You, Boges, and a number of other government apologists leave me cold because you don’t see the infringement and how second rate our democracy is. That’s fine. Wear the rose-coloured glasses. Been there, done that.

Yes, and I can honestly say that if we give up traditions and reduce society to having numbered holidays and turning our social contract into a collective agreement between those in power and those who are doing the bulk of the work at the bottom, that’s communism. Who will assert the founding cultural traditions of Canada? So far it’s the Québécois, splintered Indigenous groups, and self-segregated newcomers from Muslim or atheist societies. It’s fair to assert Canadian traditions, including English Canadian ones, yet we are constantly being told by our own government to suppress that identity because it’s racist or colonial. Of course we know that other more recent immigrant cultures are asserting themselves with much affirmation. I don’t even oppose that. Celebrate your traditions, but don’t seek to strip away the culture of your new homeland. I’d never expect Egypt to be less Egyptian or France to be less French because I move there.