At the start of every semester, I try to forecast the worry spots. This is a fool's errand: the most problematic places are the ones we didn't forecast, right?
In Spring 2022, just as I was wrapping up those posts that January, Canada blew up in our faces.
On the surface, this was about long distance truckers getting tired of CoVid restrictions. More specifically, it was about those that crossed the border with the U.S. being viewed as potentially dangerous virus transmitters by both countries. Ostensibly, that was probably true, but they were just truckers trying to do their job. The truckers staged a strike, organized public protests, camped out, and blocked border crossings.
Anyway, there were big macroeconomic consequences because they blocked the border crossings, and the U.S. and Canada trade more with each other than any other pair of countries on the planet.
So this was a big deal (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The government of Canada did not react sensibly (from an economic perspective) as shown here and here.
Amongst other things, Canada's Trudeau administration (a politically left administration that claims they support things like the right to strike and protest publicly) quickly passed a law under which they:
- Made arrests
- Conscripted private tow truck owners and forced them to use their trucks to do the government's bidding
- Towed vehicles (trucks and third party vehicles that supported the strike and blockades)
- Revoked business licenses of some trucking firms completely
- Suspended license plates on passenger vehicles involved in strikes, protests, and blockades
- Revoked licenses for other trucking firms to pass through Ontario.
- Doxxed over 90,000 people who contributed money through crowdsourcing to support the strike
- Seized bank accounts of those arrested
- Severed the ability of hundreds of people to access their funds or use their credit/debit cards for a period of days or weeks
- Took children into custody and separated them from their parents (if they were protesting).
- Confiscated pet dogs of protesters.
- More or less shut down the entire Canadian financial system for about 12 hours (and seems to have narrowly averted a nascent bank run the next day).
In addition, the Trudeau administration made clear that they felt much of the money was coming from donations from "Trumpers" in the U.S. In fact, a "reporter" in SLC used the doxxing list to contact contributors from Utah.
In short ... all the stuff that free countries are not supposed to do.
***
So why do I bring this up in 2024? There's an aphorism that the wheels of justice turn slowly but inexorably.
Canada isn't organized the same way as the U.S. Specifically, there is no equivalent of our Supreme Court.
Anyway, a case was brought and heard, by a national level judge who specializes in international terrorism cases, and the ruling came out this week:
At the outset of these proceedings ...I was leaning to the view that the decision ... was reasonable. I considered the events that occurred in Ottawa and other locations in January and February 2022 went beyond legitimate protest and reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order. I had and continue to have considerable sympathy for those in government who were confronted with this situation. Had I been at their tables at that time, I may have agreed that it was necessary ...
But:
I have concluded that the [policies enacted in 2022 did] ... not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.
Wow.
The ruling runs to about 200 pages of details and boilerplate, but the decision is as short and simple as that last quoted paragraph: the whole of the government response was illegal.
***
Of course, sometimes it's easier to say you're sorry than to ask permission. But we'd probably like government to not behave this way.
No comments:
Post a Comment