The Plot Thickens In Canada 2 (Not Required)

Sheesh. I missed this one from yesterday.

The video is cued; I'll summarize below, but the important 2 minutes are right there if you want to watch.

The woman speaking is Canada's Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. She is acting under authority of the Emergencies Act mentioned 2 posts back. Here's the money quotes:

"... These changes cover all forms of transactions ..."

" ... Highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use, are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorism Financing Act ..." (see this page of search results for some explanation)

"... We know that these platforms are being used to support ... activity that is damaging the Canadian economy ..."

"... A bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability ..."

"We are today serving notice, if your truck is being used ... the insurance on your vehicle will be suspended ..."

"The Canadian economy needs them [semi-trucks] to be doing legitimate work, not to be illegally making us all poorer ...".

I have never heard anything like this in a rich/developed/Western country.

I am not an expert, but I believe that doing these sorts of things in the U.S. would be a violation of the 4th Amendment  (seizure of your funds without due process), and the 1st Amendment (abrogation of freedom of association if you're a suspect); while deputizing private institutions as a posse comitatus to  police activities pronounced as undesirable by the government is the same logic used here to perpetuate and expand slavery before the Civil War.

The closest thing to this is the suspension of accounts in Cyprus in 2013, which ended with a lot of people having their money confiscated (which was probably a good thing, since a lot of it was ill-gotten). There are a crazy number of links on this blog from back then as that crisis evolved (see here).

***

Part of me is pleased that a macroeconomy is getting attention and being protected. But holy cow ...

And again, I'm not sympathetic to the protesters, although I recognize that they have a point about how policy affects their jobs.

I'm not sympathetic to the government of Canada either. It seems to me that a cornerstone of policy for a small or smaller country should be to avoid inconsistencies with your larger neighbor. That neighbor may not be right, but I think there's an obligation to be practical about these things.

Hopefully it's pretty obvious that I take COVID-19 seriously, and am not an anti-vaxxer or stealth conspiracist. 

With all that in mind, it should be clear that COVID-19 is a macroeconomic issue, that economic issues and policies often have unintended consequences, and that the U.S. inability to mitigate COVID-19 effectively (under either administration) is contributing to macroeconomic problems in other countries.