> The Emergencies Act is the modern-day replacement to the War Measures Act. It allows the federal government to force companies to provide services, it can require public protests to end, and limit mobility rights by preventing people from moving to designating areas.
>
> The act also allows for the military to be used as police, but several sources said that is not under active consideration.
Not a good look for Trudeau. This definitely looks like an authoritarian response to a loss of mandate. The protestors will dig in more, the response will become harsher, and the government will be in deeper trouble.
There's no "loss of mandate". The Canadian people are overwhelmingly vaccinated and don't mind wearing masks. 90+% of truckers are fully vaccinated. Canadians re-elected Trudeau during the pandemic.
The issue is that Ottawa Police were afraid of media backlash if they did any crowd control for the initial "protest" weekend. This allowed the occupiers to move in heavy machinery as barricades. When the weekend ended and the trucks didn't move, they realized they were dealing with something closer to an insurrection than a protest, and they've been impotent to stop it since.
THe people of Ottawa overwhelmingly support ending the occupation. It has terrorized women, queer people and people of color on the streets. They've been violent and confrontational with front-line workers, which forced two grocery stores to close their doors, plus a large mall. There have been two documented attempts to burn down residential apartment buildings and trap the occupants inside.
This weekend hundreds of Ottawa residents marched in a counter-protest, and also blocked the road and held up a convoy of trucks for more than 8 hours. The occupiers are a small group of people who are acting badly - shitting in the streets, getting drunk, blaring their horns, and using their children as human shields. Everyone will celebrate when they're gone for good.
Do you understand how public health works? The vaccine does not 100% prevent any infection, it reduces the odds and intensity. Some people cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons. You would think computer people would understand "defense in depth".
Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated:
Is the science settled on whether 90% vs 100% has an impact on the health of society given omicron?
> Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated
Conflating traditional anti vaxers with the new COVID anti vaxers is dishonest, they actually usually come from different parts of the political spectrum.
You don't have your facts correct because the vaccine does not inhibit transmission. Some argue it reduces the risk but the data is inconclusive.
It is militancy like yours that is elevating opposition.
I am vaccinated but support anyone that stands up to a mandate, vaccination passes or emergency powers. I don't really have to justify that any further.
Please stay home forever and never get out because some people cannot get vaccinated. No exceptions. I hope those unvaccinated prove scientists right some day. It would take decades.
it sounds like you’re using the post covid-19 definition of Vaccine.
It’s amazing that the definition of a word like vaccine could change suddenly, because it is was incompatible to one virus — a mysterious super virus whose origin is still unknown, according to the WHO.
Omicron may be "mild" to healthy, vaccinated people, but it's a serious, deadly health threat to the unvaccinated elderly.
Accordingly places where transmission is likely (eg. a small intimate restaurant) are serious and potentially deadly health risks to the elderly, unvaccinated part of the population.
So long as our hospitals are overwhelmed (as they currently are) it's a very bad idea to open up these high transmission areas to unvaccinated people, as they'll inevitably catch the disease and are so much more likely to end up in the hospital in ICU.
This is why restaurants/bars/etc should continue to have vaccine mandates even though so many people are vaccinated.
The point isn't to coerce the last 10% into getting vaccinated. It's to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed by new cases from the unvaccinated.
In all provinces, the elderly were the very first to get vaccinated. First. First to get second vaccinations, and for a long time, the only group allowed to even get a third shot.
There are no unvaccinated elderly people running around, unless they insist on not being vaccinated. In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
There's plenty of unvaccinated elderly getting themselves killed. This article has charts showing deaths/ICU/hospitalized over the last 120 days. The elderly and unvaccinated are particularily impacted. https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/covid-19-in-alberta-788-weekend-...
> In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
Yeah it's getting to the point where if stubborn old people want to meet their maker sooner than later, well sure that's their choice and we should let them, but at the moment the hospitals are overwhelmed and this has negative impacts on everyone, as it delays all the other surgeries and other work that the hospital needs to do.
I'm fine with lifting vaccine mandates once hospitals are unlikely to get overwhelmed, but it's not at all clear we're at this point yet.
Going to be very interesting to see what happens in Alberta and Sask over the next little while as they're lifting the vaccine passports.
> A death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death identified…
notice the probable or confirmed case and know that hospitals (US) are eligible for additional reimbursement with covid “case” patient from a $100 Billion CARES act fund (at minimum)
>Individuals who received at least one dose was calculated as (# of individuals who received at least one dose) / (population estimate).
Deaths are also only attributed to Vaccinated category after 14 days from the second dose, else it’s a “unvaccinated” death.
This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated. It’s just magical how “science” to advance “public health” works.
You've made a lot of claims on this post, but can you cite a source behind your statement of "This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated."? It also makes sense, since you've taken a vaccine, but you have not developed the expected antibodies until ~14 days.
This doesn't change anything in terms of hospital capacities here. The surgery backlog is massive, the hospitals are overrun with covid patients. Taking additional precautions is an attempt to try to protect the larger populations access to healthcare.
Because the few who don’t comply to public health recommendations/orders are responsible for the greater share of the economic burden of disease, and this burden was totally preventable.
That is not true at all. The greatest burden on the economy was the lockdowns and extreme countermeasures. People choosing not to get vaccinated may have caused unnecessary burden on the healthcare system, but to blame them for the struggling economy is just wrong.
I am a life scientist, and with respect, you're flatly incorrect. The first-order costs of public health measures scale linearly, and the first-order costs of infectious diseases scale exponentially. Higher-order costs are at least comparable between the two, and I would argue much higher in the case of covid than in the case of lockdowns.
(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)
A vast majority of people who contract COVID recover without any treatment. Are you arguing that the minority who don't impose higher costs than locking down the entire country?
Lets assume that the only cost associated with covid is lost work. So lets weight death rate by age group and years to retirement i.e. if you're in the 50-59 age group you have a 1.3 percent death rate and we'll say 10 years till retirement, 20-29 0.2% and 40 years (we'll exclude people from 60 up as they obviously contribute nothing to society and their deaths are meaningless especially in a economic sense /s). We'll ignore age distribution as we're talking about Canada which has a population pyramid which is pretty much square accross ages 10-60 (similiar to US FYI).
So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.
In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.
So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.
NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.
This is obviously a gross oversimplification, but it's exactly the kind of napkin maths that people need to make before they pass judgment based on no more than gut-feeling and misguided suggestions from the internet.
Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]
Over 900k dead in the US alone from covid. Sure, that's a minority, but can you really shrug your shoulders at that number and say it's just a minority, no big deal?
Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend mandating anything that gets in the way of people taking those risks if they choose to.
> Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc.
Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?
I take the blame for originally mentioning car accidents, but this is not really something you can compare to COVID especially when you are talking about government mandates. A serious car accident is deadly for anyone, including teenagers or young working-aged adults. A COVID infection is not even close to as deadly for those age groups.
Like seatbelt mandates, taxes on tobacco products, food safety regulation (preventing the importation of certain hazardous foods), environmental regulation, or any other sort of coercive action (either against individuals, against corporations, or against government itself) taken by government to protect people?
It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.
What extreme countermeasures were done in BC? Closing Yoga studios for 4 weeks? Our economy has done pretty well during the pandemic. Is it all fun and games, nope.
As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.
For my part, while I do blame the unvaccinated at least in part, I place even greater blame on all the anti-mask and anti-social-distancing insanity we’ve seen in both Canada and the US. (In many cases these are the same groups of people, it seems... But I believe in being specific in my accusations.)
While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.
You really don’t need to be omnipotent to know it. For months, Canada was hovering at an Rt just above 1.0. Very little more would have been required to tip the balance.
Canada would also have to be okay with completely closed borders for the rest of its existence. Either that or come up with some way to unilaterally enforce COVID countermeasures in every country on Earth simultaneously until it is completely eradicated. I'm sure it was a nice thought when infection rates were low enough, but after thinking long-term about the problem it becomes clear that government mandates can only do much for so long.
Exactly. In Canada, $40,000 per person was spent on lockdowns most of which went to large companies posting record profits. Zilch on making an ICU room for every Canadian which is what that money could have bought should it have been spent responsibly.
It is wild to me that people don't understand that with infinite funds spent the day the first wave hit the first fully qualified nurses that would be hitting the hospitals would just be arriving now at the earliest. And those wouldn't have spent a day on a ward or in an ICU yet... and you would be years away from more doctors. Not to mention physical infrastructure.. all the while the virus scales exponentially!
I am prepared to believe this number, but I think a citation would be very helpful here. In any case, have you bothered to also look up the economic burden of disease of covid-19 in Canada, in terms of QALYs and/or DALYs?
The poster's assertion that none of the pandemic money was spent on increasing ICU capacity is false, capacities were increased in every province, in mine by about 35-40%.
That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.
I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada. My assertion is honest. And you’ve provided no data / argument to refute it.
Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?
If you think that increasing hospital capacity scales infinitely with the money spent then I think your model of the healthcare system is incorrect and as such the premise of your question is incorrect.
Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.
"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."
You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?
$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?
QALYs and DALYs are how you measure the burden of health.
Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.
It’s pretty easy. Mandating people get vaccinated for diseases they already had is the height of dumb. That’s what this protest is about, does the govt have the right to force your employer to fire you if you don’t get vaccinated for a disease you already have.
Attempting to have a conversation about long distances whilst not learning the terms for either miles or kilometers is also dumb. You need to be able to talk in something more than allegory at some point.
The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.
Without QALYs and DALYs, any comparison or weighing of dollars and health outcomes are meaningless. Wiki has enough to point you in the right general direction!
There were no orders but recommendations only in regards to vaccines. I understand you realize the difference between the order and recommendation. Recommendation does not require compliance.
And the burden was caused by lockdowns and complete absence of vaccines in Canada for a big while
In the context of public health, "compliance" is a word that is used to refer to the percentage of people who follow expert advice. The same word, "compliance", is used to describe how many people take their prescribed pills properly and on schedule. The word doesn't only apply for "mandates" or "orders", and as you correctly pointed out, what ultimately matters is what people do.
I'm pretty sure the decision to require truckers to be vaccinated at the border crossing or quarantine (no, they're not forced to vaccinate) came about around Nov 18th when Delta was ramping up. It's just that the implementation was not immediate. I think it made sense back then to try and figure out ways to generally increase the vaccine coverage. By the way the US has the exact same requirement (so even getting the Canadian Federal government to reverse its position here wouldn't change anything for those truckers).
Now with Omicron (for the last few weeks at least) it's clearly not needed any more, but governments move slowly, so it'd take a few more weeks. There's other restrictions that were put in around that timeframe that no longer make sense, like requiring PCR tests, and all those are on their way out.
This protest makes no sense except as a way of sowing chaos and seeking to destabilize the country.
Because otherwise there is approximately nothing the federal government can do to end the blockade if the protestor don't leave by themselves. No matter if most of the population want it to end.
This allows the federal government to send the army if necessary (although Trudeau said they wouldn't), allows the police to fine and detain protestor that do not want to leave the blockade. And allows the federal government to require private companies to provide services, in this case towing companies to tow the rigs.
It also allows for freezing bank accounts of e.g. companies that have trucks participating in the blockade without a court mandate.
I think, but I am not sure, that this only applies to "strategic sites", in this case the border and maybe highways. Protester blocking a random street in Ottawa may not be concerned.
So, why require the mandate: To prevent the slim minority of truckers participating in the blockade from impacting everyone else for months.
A proper answer would be to lift the mandate to vaccinate all truckers, because it doesn't make any sense anyway, give them 2 days to clear the roads, and bring in troops if they refuse. Problem is, Trudeau's ego is too big to yield to a bunch of unwashed truckers.
Except Trudeau lifting the mandate would not change anything since this is also a requirements by the US for truckers to cross.
But sure, it's all because of Trudeau's ego.
"beginning in early January 2022, DHS will require that all inbound foreign national travelers crossing U.S. land or ferry POEs – whether for essential or non-essential reasons – be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and provide related proof of vaccination. This approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers, students, and healthcare workers to get vaccinated."
Except Trudeau lifting the mandate would not change anything
So it causes no harmful change for Canadians in general, for as you say, nothing changes.
So... why not give in to this demand then?
As an aside, forcing truckers to get vaccinated makes no sense. They mostly work in isolation, and it isn't like blocking the virus at borders really helps these days.
I support forced vaccination for front line health care workers, those caring for the elderly, where it matters.
> Police have said they are concerned about how the convoy has attracted far-right and extremist elements, and on Sunday confirmed they were dealing with more than 60 criminal investigations, with alleged offences including "mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage". - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60281088
The Nazi flags, the Gadsden flags, the Trump flags, the fact that they're saying racist, sexist, homopobic stuff in the Zello? The fact that their contributions are from right-wing US sources and the extreme right press is giving them publicity? How about the fact that they love Pat King?
I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
> The Nazi flags, the Gadsden flags, the Trump flags, the fact that they're saying racist, sexist, homopobic stuff in the Zello? The fact that their contributions are from right-wing US sources and the extreme right press is giving them publicity? How about the fact that they love Pat King?
From a distance it's very hard to judge what's true and what isn't. My level of trust in the media these days is extremely low so reading stories about Nazi Flags I'm thinking "click bait". Meanwhile forums like reddit - and slowly HN as well - are clearly filled with "paid shill" accounts. So what to trust?
> I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
I'm sorry to hear that. I did check your HN profile briefly and you "seem legit"
The harassment of ordinary citizens has been pretty well documented by the press and cursory search would give you all the evidence you need to see the OPs anecdote aligns well with what has been reported.
“define harassment” is neither a good argument nor a discussion in good faith.
> PAT KING: Pat King is a far-right protester who has said in videos posted to social media that there may be future plans to target politicians' homes and that "the only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets." He has called for the arrest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly.
> King has gained attention online for a video posted to Twitter in which he decries the "depopulation" of white people, as well as another video posted in 2019 in which he makes racist remarks about Jewish, Muslim, and Chinese people.
Their core demand up until two days ago was to depose our current federal government and replace it with a their own government. When is a cat not a cat? How clear must it be for you to understand?
Name me a protest since 2020 that had a specific and documented demand to appeal to a head of state to remove a democratically elected government and replace it with a "people's council" composed entirely of the protestors?
That seems completely unrelated - it's a fair comparison to the actions of the protest itself (occupying a section of a downtown), but I'm not aware of any specific CHAZ / CHOP demands to permanently change the makeup or structure of any level of government, especially federal.
"A new Angus Reid poll showed that 54% of Canadians support an immediate halt to all pandemic restrictions, a stark contrast to the 56% who said as recently as in December they would have supported another round of lockdowns over Omicron."
You didn't actually link to an article on Angus Reid. Here's one:
> As the country rolls into another week of uncertainty, nearly three-quarters of Canadians (72%) say the time has come for protesters to “go home, they have made their point.”
That's a editorialized quote. The source survey didn't say anything about "immediately" or "all" restrictions.
The specific question was "It’s time to end restrictions and let people self isolate if they’re at risk.", which describes basically the process that basically all provinces were going through prior to the protests.
You're being mislead by corporate and party line propaganda.
Over 1.6 million people tweeted about the Canadian trucker protests over the country’s vaccine mandates, reaching about 330 million users. Of the top 100 most retweeted tweets on the topic, 79% were in support of the protests.
I have yet to see any data that supports the assertion that Canadians are still happy with masks and other restrictions. The few polls in the news tend to be small sample sizes, and tend to be from biased pools of respondents. Basically it’s not good data it’s just politically manipulated numbers to support their policy.
None of us are happy with masks and restrictions. We all want them to end. That doesn't mean we're in a hurry to cull the weak, the elderly, and the infirm rapidly by exposing them to this virus a quickly and easily, which is what would still happen at this point in the pandemic.
I don't know that you'd ever find a poll that claimed Canadians are "happy with masks and other restrictions." Believing something to be necessary to minimize death toll and being happy about it are VASTLY different things.
Liberals ran on passports/restrictions and lost seats.
The majority just took the injections to keep the job. Booster uptake is below 50%, because it’s not required.
Pretty much every business in deep-liberal cities at this point simply ignores restrictions.
What mandate? Seems like there wasn’t one in the first place.
It doesn't look like, it is authoritarian response to something which should be protected.
Using government power intended for things like war to suppress a protest is ridiculous, if this is what being "liberal" is about, I'm out.
I hope the response is a protest escalation. Not my country, not my protest, but I know who I'm rooting for.
Contrast this to what was happening in Minneapolis a couple of summers ago... people burning down buildings, shops, and police stations and the fire and police literally afraid to go places in the city until we had armed forces marching through the streets. Those are the kind of popular uprisings that need to be dealt with, not streets being blocked by unhappy people.
Serious question though, which applies to both the Canadian truckers case and the Minneapolis example above - does a right to protest an issue also include a right to inflict economic harm (on broader society, in poorly-targeted fashion) in order to raise awareness? Is the amount of economic harm (say, %GDP of the town, region, or country) or how broadly it's targeted ("random retail stores"? "Anything that relies on ground-based trade between Canada and the US"?) a factor in how allowable it is? Where does one draw a line of reasonability here?
"Economic harm" is a really weak criterion all around for restricting protest rights and one ripe for abuse. I'm not sure if this is the only impact that a line should be drawn at all.
"Public safety" is a good one, you're free to protest but there has to be adequate access for emergency services to get to people in need.
"No significant destruction" is a good one, not just making a mess in the streets but when your movement starts actively destroying property, looting, etc.
If you keep doing economic harm, your movement will tend to get pretty unpopular pretty quickly and the social pressure instead of government force will likely get to you in the end.
Lots of people walking of the job will do significant amounts of economic harm, I don't want people in certain jobs to become effective slaves because their job is important to the economy. And also a general strike is a very powerful action which should be done from time to time, explicitly very economically powerful and definitely should be protected.
> No significant destruction" is a good one, not just making a mess in the streets but when your movement starts actively destroying property, looting, etc
This one is also ripe for abuse - outside forces have been using agents provocateurs for centuries, often undercover cops.
Notably the Canadian government has numerous examples of employing agents provocateurs, enough examples that there is a section of the Wikipedia article dedicated to examples from the Canadian government. [0]
> Serious question though, which applies to both the Canadian truckers case and the Minneapolis example above - does a right to protest an issue also include a right to inflict economic harm (on broader society, in poorly-targeted fashion) in order to raise awareness?
Almost unexceptionally yes?
Arab Spring in Egypt, civil rights lunch counter sit-ins, the protests in East Germany in 89...
I'm actually having a hard time thinking of historic protests which didn't inflict economic harm.
I'm not asking whether significant protests tend to cause economic harm. I'm asking whether there should be reasonable limits. I think it's easy to come up with a feel-good answer like "the economic impact of the protest should match the severity and importance of the thing bring protested", but it's hard to have good rules for where that line of reasonable-ness is.
Hyperbolic example: If there was a 0.01% minority in your country/region which was violently opposed to some existing minor local law or regulation, would it be ok for them to shut down half the economy over it? Think of all the secondary damage that's doing every time someone gets upset over something relatively-small in the big picture. I think most would think that's unreasonable. It's this question that gets at the heart of when and/or if it's ok for a heavy-handed government to come in and put a stop to things. When is it reasonable for the powers that be to intervene and "stop a protest" because the toll is too high for the weight and/or popularity of the matter at hand?
Serious question- how many rights are ok to trample, and how much economic harm is ok for a government to inflict upon its people? I can't take the claims of economic harm from the protests seriously when the govt itself inflicted unnecessary measures that destroyed lives that far outweigh the economic costs of these protests. Besides, the govt can end this issue as well, just end the mandates. The vaccines don't work against Omicron anyways.
Although not as well as they did on previous variants of the virus, the vaccines continue to work extraordinarily well against Omicron. For example, consider the latest data from California (https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/):
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 5.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 11.4 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 10, 2022 to January 16, 2022, unvaccinated people were 21.8 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
None of those three points should warrant a mandate.
For the first point, I have some doubt as many covid infections go entirely undetected. If you don't have symptoms you don't get tested and don't end up a statistic. Even the CDC says it expects there have been 4x as many infections as reported.
For the next two, those aren't things which need government compelled vaccinations. You're taking a risk with your own health, I don't care if you take a risk and it kills you.
If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
The only metric that should require vaccination should be to prevent public spread, and then only if the risk to other people is beyond a threshold. It is pretty clear that omicron burned through populations regardless of vaccination status or previous infection. Forcing vaccinations could have lowered this rate a bit, but doubtfully enough to prevent everyone who was going to be exposed from being exposed anyway at a slightly later date.
If you're forcing vaccinations so somebody is more likely to get infected in March rather than January, it is not worth it or a justifiable action. That seems to be the situation with the current vaccine and current dominant variant. Infection is inevitable, short term delay is the only achievable goal, therefore mandates are no longer an acceptable use of government power. Omicron isn't in decline because people were smart or safe or did what they were told, it declined because it ran out of people to infect, vaccination rate didn't seem to significantly alter this pattern around the world except for when the peak happened and perhaps how wide and tall it was.
> You're taking a risk with your own health, I don't care if you take a risk and it kills you.
> If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
You just immediately contradicted yourself. "It's only a risk to you", but also the government needs to find more hospital staff to take care of you. The fact is, nurses and doctors are burnt out and they're leaving the field because of this bullshit. They don't have enough people to train new health care workers, and even if they did it takes years before they're qualified. You can't just throw money at a staffing issue like this.
Even if you could throw money at a staffing issue, I still would rather mandate vaccines than require the government to vacuum up/print tons of money to treat illness that's trivially preventable. COVID vaccination is leagues cheaper than COVID hospitalization, and that cost affects everyone.
It would be! And if banning cheeseburgers had remotely the same material consequences as vaccination (i.e. virtually none), and would be remotely as effective for preserving public health, we could seriously consider the notion that we should go ahead and do it. But since it would, in fact, not be nearly as effective (because if I stopped eating cheeseburgers alone I wouldn’t be 16x less likely to die of an obesity related condition), and because it would make everyone besides vegans very sad and do terrible harm to lots of industries, whereas vaccination mostly just harms the funeral business and only makes people very very bad at statistics unhappy, it is, in fact - like all comparisons between obesity and vaccination status I’ve seen people who think they’re clever whip out - a completely ridiculous comparison.
Both types of action aren't stupid. One is, because it would have deleterious consequences with little benefit; one isn't, because it has very positive consequences with little cost. I already said that, but maybe if I say it again it'll register?
Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10...but I do well, I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes. But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that. Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social. Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
> Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10
Twice right? And then a saline booster every 6 months too right?
> I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes.
Your lead argument for mandating vaccination was the potential cost of care.
> But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that.
I have no clue what you’re talking about here.
> Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social.
I said no such thing.
There’s a world of difference between opposing a mandate that everybody take a vaccine and opposing vaccines.
Everybody who wants one should get one. They’re free, available on just about every corner, and I’m not aware of anyone right now who wants one who can’t get one.
I’m also not aware of anyone except the most paranoid triple vaxed that still wear a mask outdoors. Now thats anti-social. Not “following the science” either.
> Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
> We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
For posterity, for the third time: obesity is not comparable to COVID, because obesity is not a problem which is instantly resolvable for almost no cost and no effort.
Smoking is also not comparable to COVID, because nicotine addiction is also not a problem that is instantly resolvable, for almost no cost. We also tax the hell out of nicotine, which helps offset the burden smokers place on society. If you're content with how we treat smokers, is there some way we could analogously tax the voluntarily unvaccinated to help offset the burden they're placing on the rest of us that you'd be happy with?
Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way. There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation. You can argue from that, if you want; but if you're going to try arguing from specifics, by analogy to specific things, you need to actually think those specifics out.
For posterity, I'll also try to clarify what I meant about taxes, and why what you're advocating for precisely leads to the consequences you claim not to support:
A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations. There's no real economic benefit to spending that extra money, and that money needs to come from somewhere. It could come from debt or printing money, but that leads to inflation. Inflation makes everyone poorer; it makes it harder to afford basic necessities like housing and food, almost inevitably leading to some degree of starvation and homelessness. It could come from reallocating money that the government spends on programs elsewhere - but those programs generally exist for a reason, usually to help the people in the most dire of straits, and cutting funding to those programs is going to hurt those people - often leading to, you guessed it, consequences like starvation and homelessness. Or it could come from raising taxes - on the poor and middle class, which is awful, because generally speaking those people need that money (and guess what happens when people don't have money they need); or on the rich, which is probably the least awful option, Laffer curve be damned, but is also the least likely to happen, and is still wholly unnecessary. And of course: this ignores what was mentioned above, which is that there's no amount of money the government could throw at hospitals to let them instantaneously increase their capacity 50x over, because the staff literally doesn't exist. So it's an inevitability that the unvaccinated are clogging our hospitals, leading people to die due to treatable conditions.
> Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
That you consider giving up body autonomy "almost no cost" is what's simply insane.
It's not a sliding scale where $X of savings for Y% of personal choice. It's a black and white line that involves someone else, whether elected or appointed, deciding that you must inject this into your body for the good of society.
> I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way.
Damn right.
> There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation.
The only people that think the world is going to end if Trucker Joe does not get vaccinated are the same triple vaxed ones that are still wearing masks outdoors.
> A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations...
That doesn't matter and claiming that you could use the same money for $PULL_HEARTSTRINGS does not make the argument any more valid.
People who give up individual freedoms to save a buck will end both enslaved and penniless.
This is the irony here in that in the situations recently where environmentalists and indigenous protestors halted pipeline construction the Conservatives in parliament railed against these actions, citing economic harms.
Now with these protests, causing even more incredibly severe economic harms they've demurred from criticizing the protestors.
I hope you’re just as outraged by the removal of first nations protesters blockading pipelines last year - because those were more peaceful than the trucker stuff and they were crushed with pretty extreme force by the rcmp
One group is protesting a permanent degradation of their home for the rich to get richer. The other is protesting temporary measures to protect the most vulnerable among us. Yeah, my sympathies are a not exactly even. Either way, invoking the emergencies act is stupid - if it wasn’t needed to arrest and remove pipeline protesters, it’s just theatrics now.
Another way to look at it is energy, especially affordable energy is an essential service that many many people rely on, especially in a cold place like Canada.
Regardless, I agree that the emergencies act is overkill. I think the Canadian government should sit down with the protestors and come up with a plan that alleviates the situation. I don't think a police vs protestor clash in the streets is going to end well for anyone.
They didn’t sit down with pipeline protesters, why should they sit down with this mob?
“You need to get vaccinated, or you can’t work in cross border trucking or go to restaurants for a year or two” is an infinitely smaller ask than “give up control of your land to us, also your drinking water is poison”
Truckers as a group are not what most people would call privileged! Hard work, long hours away from their family, and not great pay. Most of them aren’t very educated and came from humble homes.
The protesters are, by and large, not truckers. There are some 300000 truckers (most of them vaccinated) in Canada. A few hundred of them are involved in the protests. It is not a truckers protest, it’s a people in pickups and passenger cars protest.
As for pay, I’m seeing wages of $85K + bennies advertised around here. That’s not a bad wage.
"Using government power intended for things like war"
This isn't the war measures act. It is a response specifically targeted to situations like this.
"I hope the response is a protest escalation"
That's neat. I hope that every protester that misused a privilege of their CDL lose their truck license, lose insurance, have their bank accounts locked, and face enormous fines. I guess we have differing hopes.
Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
"Not my country"
Oh gosh, what a surprise...
And then, of course, a comparison with completely irrelevant other events that most of us also found reprehensible.
I hate when the protests appear on HN because it makes me realize how terrible "right wing" so many on here are (not conservative -- I'm conservative -- but rather a particularly...stupid and angry version that now parades as right wing in the US), and how absolutely reprehensible opinions are. A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
> But if you try to force your political will through force [...] you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in
Like forcing people out of their job for refusing a vaccine?
Disclaimer: I'm vaccinated and I encourage everyone to do it. But no one should have to under threat to their livelihood, especially given the absurd logical inconsistencies of the mandate rules.
> Like forcing people out of their job for refusing a vaccine?
Before vaccination was politicized in the US (bizarrely, I must say, through mechanisms that I find absolutely baffling), many jobs had mandatory vaccinations. Most healthcare setting have mandatory yearly flu vaccinations, for instance. The military has a whole plethora of mandatory vaccinations, including some pretty crazy ones. And of course schools, daycare, etc have forced vaccinations.
Suddenly it's a big issue. Ask yourself why.
And for what it's worth, I've been against mandates since omicron made it evident that they were no longer useful. I have zero tolerance for these protests, though, and would like to see them absolutely stomped.
Here's the why: all of those vaccination requirements are known to people before they enter the job/school/military. That is wholly different from being in a profession and then one day being told you have to get vaccinated or get fired.
I'm curious what your answer is. To me its obvious: people don't trust these vaccines (or these authorities) the way that they have trusted other vaccines with much longer histories of use.
The next why is a hairier question that a lot of people will have different answers for, but it all stems from that lack of trust.
There are traditional anti-vaxxers of the "my body is my temple" ilk: Organic food, often vegan or vegetarian, against all vaccines and with an often bizarre notion of what is a "chemical" or not. Usually super fit. No one is surprised when these people are against COVID vaccines as it's consistent with everything else they stand for.
But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7. Often very unhealthy. They've never had the slightest concern or attention for any vaccine or medication, including novel, experimental medications (including those which they'll eagerly accept when they get COVID). New vaccines like the HPV vaccine, or yearly flu vaccine changes that have whatever random assortment of other ingredients, have never been of any concern or earned even a moment of their concern.
But suddenly they have very specific thoughts about this vaccine? Come on. And if it's the scary "changes your DNA" (but actually doesn't) bit, there are alternative, less effective more traditional vaccines which they also refuse.
It's tribalism. Early on their group ("conservatives") took some positions about responding to COVID -- anti-masking, anti-lockdowns, etc -- and that cemented into positions that somehow morphed into being anti-vaccine (basically anti anything seen as controlling or responding to COVID), despite there being literally nothing from a values or political perspective that would explain it (indeed, there are loads of classic conservative tenets that would directly oppose this anti-vax position). Then loads of people realized they could grift off of exploiting this divide, politicians -- most of whom are vaccinated -- saw an opening to pander, etc.
It is baffling and needs to be studied in depth. Tens to hundreds of millions of people could self-destructively be turned against something simply because they saw it as outside their tribe and messaging.
> But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7.
You're making some pretty specific assertions here that your whole rant seems to hinge on. Source?
Dismissing a considered response to a question as a "rant" is such lame trolling.
As to your demand for a "source" -- as if there's a scientific paper I can cite -- there are zero rational people who can read what I wrote and seriously question it, beyond weak HN trolls who have nothing.
It's uncomfortable for sure, though: Knowing that one's entire position about complex topics (vaccines, AGW, etc) is dictated by tribalism is pretty embarrassing when one really thinks about it. Particularly if one has blanketed it in lots of ridiculous rationalizations and explanations -- a legacy of nonsense -- carefully curating their YouTube channels of disinformation.
So, no source? You wrote a lot of text attacking a certain type of person; I'm just wondering if that type of person reflects reality, or if it's just something you made up to be angry at?
> You wrote a lot of text attacking a certain type of person
I "attacked" no one. If you feel an attack in it, you really need to reflect on why that makes you feel persecuted. Why a political demographic with zero historic interest in vaccines suddenly feels very opinionated about it is fascinating and disturbing.
I made a broad societal observation -- a plainly evident observation -- about tribalism overriding rational thought. And it's important to note that tribalism cuts all ways, and there are many cases of the "left" polarizing around something that is in no way a liberal or leftist value specifically because it's the tribal position.
I had a similar reaction to your post as blindmute. I don't feel attacked, as I don't see myself in the people you're talking about. But I also don't take for granted that those people even exist in the way that you described them.
> But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7.
So not to speak for the other poster, but I think another way to phrase their comment would be: what makes you believe this army exists? How many of them have you personally interacted with vs saw in some form of infotainment?
I ask because your description sounds like the kind of political cartoon you'd see in a news rag, and might be bolstered by that guy you remember from highschool or that crazy uncle that you can't stand. But I don't think its plainly evident that these people actually exist in great numbers.
I strongly believe what you're saying about tribalism. I just think your comment is another example of it.
I would say the difference is many of the other vaccines actually work. You won’t catch the disease if you get them. The covid vaccine does not do that. Also they fired people for not taking it but now require those who took it but are sick to work anyways. It’s no longer about protecting the population but rather forcing people to do what they are told. Forcing us back to work while sick was the line crossed that changed my mind this vaccine is not about public safety.
5x more likely to die while unvaccinated than vaccinated.
Side effects of getting covid are significantly worse than any real reported side effects as well. Which at this point you will get covid if you haven't had it already.
All the sick people piling up in the hospital ruins care for others who are in ER for other reasons, this isn't about control, it's about doing whats best for everyone.
We've had vaccine mandates for decades at this point, if it wasn't for the Fox News & the Murdoch Cinematic Universe this would really be a non-issue.
> That's neat. I hope that every protester that misused a privilege of their CDL lose their truck license, lose insurance, have their bank accounts locked, and face enormous fines. I guess we have differing hopes.
Yeah. Ruining people's lives is a weird desire that somehow became very popular in recent years among the same people who usually criticized punitive justice.
> Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
Signing petitions and lobbying is a privilege of people with power. Neither the US nor France became a republic by signing petitions. Those are, of course, extremes, but those events are the basis of the liberal democracy, so it is quite ridiculous to dismiss everything beyond petitions and parties as crossing a line. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't enacted because someone signed a petition either. In fact, the protests were widely unpopular among people (https://imgur.com/4GYbaDt). Gene Sharp, a political scientists that studied nonviolent struggle, described in his book (http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TARA.pdf ) 198 methods of nonviolent actions, and they include far more possibilities than meek petitions.
>A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
And there is a vicious cycle where people are trying to one-up garbage takes by coming up with more and more ridiculous responses to each other.
Have you ever done what you're talking about? I have. It's borderline impossible to get even 100 votes and you have to start by cold calling minimum 100 people to sign consent to candidacy. If you actually believe anything you've said you're completely out to lunch.
Damage in Minneapolis was mostly confined to a singular street.
Singular.
At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either, though I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
I've spent more than a decade living in Minneapolis, I wasn't confused by crazy news sources.
>At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either
The police abandoned the 3rd precinct station which was burned down later that night. How's that for being afraid to be in a place?
There were plenty of stories of fire trucks not going places for security reasons, and eventually firemen had national guard escorts. I don't know what that is besides "being afraid" to go places in the city.
>>“We were faced with these fail fail fail options,” Mr. Frey (Minneapolis mayor) said. “We were literally having to choose between preventing additional looting, protecting a precinct and providing escorts to firefighters to put out fires. There was no way we could do all three.”
>Damage in Minneapolis was mostly confined to a singular street.
A main street which crossed the cities, miles long. And damage wasn't at all confined there. There were several hot spots around the cities.
>I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
Well, here's the New York Times backing up my claims.
There is no loss of mandate, if the opinion polls are anything to go by. Besides, the Canadian people chose the government in the middle of the pandemic last year. Is there a more comprehensive definition of a "mandate" than a federal election?
Whether the response is authoritarian depends on how it is enforced. The police have basically failed to enforce any law on the occupiers on parliament hill (I live here). If the local enforcement had happened preemptively and as per the law, the situation wouldn't have escalated as far as it has done.
My comment was a nitpick about how the Canadian electoral system works: no one outside of that particular riding voted for Justin Trudeau, they only voted for their own member of parliament.
> If we had ranked choice you'd have a Liberal/NDP supermajority.
That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties. Maybe you would indeed have a supermajority of left-of-center parties but you can't conclude that they'd all have the same Covid restriction policies as the current ones.
> That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties
Ranked choice (any form, not just IRV) voting systems without proportional allocation (whether multimember districts with STV, mixed member proportional, or party-list proportional, or something else) do not significantly increase the number of viable parties.
On the other hand, I'm amazed that 5% of the population voted for the People's Party of Canada -- a party which had no hope of winning. This absolutely split the vote on the right enough to make the CPC lose seats.
There are decent arguments that that wasn't the case - that rather the PPC drew out a lot of anti-institution voters who would've voted not just for the CPC, but also the Greens, and those who would've spoiled their ballots or not voted at all.
I did as a protest to both left and right malaise. In Canada a party gets a certain level of funding based on their popular vote which is another reason I voted for them.
Well that’s a silly thing to say. I don’t like governments elected on Tuesday. I’d prefer Wednesday. See that’s another silly thing said. Your opinions of FPTP voting have absolutely nothing to do with anything. The government was elected as per the defined rules.
And yet somehow there is regular turnover of the governing party approximately every 10 years, and the dominant parties have almost to a one been centrist. Not a terrible system.
Centrist by definition or by some objective measure? In the U.S. for example, the "center" is quite conservative compared to some other western nations.
If people could vote as they truly wanted without fear of throwing away their votes, the center would almost certainly move.
As to the back and forth between two major parties, that's hardly surprising. I'm not sure that indicates much in terms of what people actually want.
The idea is that parties have to appeal to a various groups in society in order to win elections, preventing them from taking any position that is too obnoxious to any one group. Thus, centrism.
Systems with ranked choice or similar measures to encourage smaller parties end up with a similar situation, but with less stability. Since those parties appeal to narrower bands of society, they are unable to form a government. Eventually they are forced into coalition, which brings them to the same place as the major parties in FPTP: compromise. Yet, since coalitions are inherently more fragile than parties, you get less stability, and less institutional pressure on individuals in government and cabinet to represent wider interests.
FPTP is really quite common in the western world. Going so far as to say it makes the government “barely legitimate” is a strong claim. Without other evidence, this claim relies entirely on how much we trust your sense of proportion.
Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
> FPTP is really quite common in the western world.
I don’t think this is true outside the English-speaking countries. Most “Western” countries are in Europe and have systems with some degree of proportionality where coalition governments are the norm.
> Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
It was an intentionally extreme comparison to show that “operates according to the rules” is not sufficient for a system to count as democratic. Of course Canada is much closer to counting as a liberal democracy than North Korea is, but for reasons other than “it operates according to its own internal rules”.
Perhaps a better analogy would have been Hong Kong a few years ago (before the situation there became worse and things became more directly controlled by the central Chinese state). Hong Kong has never been a democracy by any reasonable definition, but did have robust rule of law and liberal rights, despite elections being basically rigged due to the functional constituencies system.
I agree with your criticism of first past the post.
The the proposal of the convoy occupiers is that their organization picks a committee to run the country. That's a significantly less legitimate government with absolutely no claim at a mandate.
Indeed, I don’t think such a government would be democratically legitimate either. The point is that we simply can’t rely on the composition of the parliament to determine what most Canadians believe about any particular issue.
The best we can do is look at opinion polls, which suggest that most people want to get rid of most Covid restrictions, but also don’t support the trucker protest.
It was a snap election was it not? To me it seemed like the Canadian government was trying to take advantage of some weird timing/power trick to remain in government. Instead of waiting for the normal time to re-elect they saw an opportunity to stay in power. I am uneducated on Canadian politics so I could be seeing it wrong
No it’s not a trick it’s a feature of the parliamentary system. Arguably it’s much more Democratic in that you enable voters to choose whether they would like a change of leadership, anytime a Legislature is unable to function.
OTOH in a Presidential system you get no such opportunity to get the public’s opinion. You have to wait until the end of terms (congressional or presidential or both).
That makes sense to me. But which people get to choose when to re-elect a government? I read that the Governor General was the one to call this last election. Do only certain elected officials get the power to call this or can anyone?
Technically, the Governor General calls the electuin, but in practice it's not his or her choice, unless something unusual happens. Just a rubber stamp.
If a majority of Members of Parliament vote yes on a no-confidence vote, that will trigger an election. Otherwise the prime minister chooses when an election will happen, within 5 years. If the government is a minority, it is likely it will call an election within a year or two if they're confident they could get a majority (this happened last year). Otherwise, with a majority government, they tend to wait longer before calling an election.
> At the federal level, a vote of no confidence is a motion presented by a member of the House of Commons that explicitly states the House has no confidence in the incumbent government.[3] The government may also declare any bill or motion to be a question of confidence.
Major bills like budgets are automatically confidence votes as well. I think you need to get into the parliamentary minutiae to understand when other votes could cause an election.
Canada got vaccine way after the US because they simply wouldn’t help companies pay for R&D and secure orders earlier, like the US did. So while you could get a walk-in vaccine at Wallmart here in America people were waiting in line for weeks for a chance at an appointment in Canada.
Imagine how many lives it could have saved instead had they just put that money toward getting vaccines earlier.
This is how basically all elections involving a minority government happen here. They’re always trying to game the election timing to upgrade to a majority. Stephen Harper did it too (minority in 2006, majority in 2008).
Polling whether rights should be suspended is dangerous. I know nothing of Canadian law, but in the US if 2/3 polled said a peaceful protest should be broken up by the military. The response should condemnation and reassertion of our unalienable rights.
This is not a peaceful protest. There have been multiple documented assaults on the street and of people in the service industry. There were several attempts to burn down residential buildings full of people. The protestors have violated injunctions against making noises at volumes that are harmful to people's hearing, and depriving people of sleep.
That’s it? That many people are there and this is the rampant violence? Lol. This is tame as hell. We’re you clutching your pearls this much during the violent BLM protests where people actually died and buildings burned to the ground with bodies later found inside?
I’ve been a lurker for many years, but felt I needed to make an account to counter you here.
What about X or Y is not a valid response to this argument. You can have no public opinion on antifa or BLM in another country to have the opinion that activity in your own community is not okay. We can compare this to BLM or antifa, but we can also compare BLM or antifa to the Arab spring or French revolution to say that they’re relatively peaceful too.
The fact is this entire thing has been horribly covered by the media.
There are a lot of groups and factions involved in the protest. The main leadership group is organized (and fundraised) by Canada Unity, and their original demands were to overthrow the democratically elected government to install themselves as government and rule through the senate and governer general. You can look that up in their original MOU on the way back machine.
The means of the protest was to park heavy equipment and harass the citizens of downtown Ottawa (via keeping them awake 24/7 with train horns, arguably a form of warfare) until the federal government capitulated to demands. This is essentially the “I’m not touching you, but my hand is directly in front of your face” form of harassment. Later that evolved into blocking border crossings, which is explicitly illegal and explicitly under the criminal code listed as not an acceptable form of protest.
The complications of this issue are confounded by the fact that more than half the donated funds are foreign funds to a protest that was deemed an illegal action.
I personally support the spirit of the protest (i.e. the vaccines should be optional for most jobs and the vaccine mandate should be relaxed) but not the tools they are using, in particular blocking a vital bridge and the honking shenanigans.
I personally have no problem in expressing a nuanced point of view or accepting that I got something wrong. Truth is a very elusive concept. And I rather learn than argue.
The person I was replying to however is aggressively partisan in his opinions. And while it's true that my comment wasn't a proper rebuttal, it does address his lack of credibility for arguing a one sided view of the world.
The only reason for the act is because of the illegal blockades which is affecting essential services, goods and livelihood of local business and citizens.
A peaceful protest cannot hold people hostage by blocking their access to essential services and goods, and trapping them in.
If the protest stopped doing that, then it's fine to continue as long as it wants.
You can't have a very small minority get its way by simply holding others hostage to their services and goods. The point of a protest is to be heard and get people to consider your cause, not to consider your demands through extraction.
I've watched 40 hours of multiple live streams at night and in the morning, it is peaceful. I have gone to events myself and it was peaceful. A lot of families brought kids there, doubt you'd see so many children if it was not peaceful.
It's like saying that locking you inside your house is peaceful, because all I did was put a big truck in front of your door which didn't physically harm you.
You're only including direct physical violence as part of your "not peaceful" definition. But blocking major road arteries and bridges that are essential to the economy and to bringing in/out services and goods to the people of Ontario is also an act that a peaceful protest wouldn't do.
I'm very pro-protest by the way. Including for people I disagree with. A few broken windows, some small contained fires in trash cans, and just the general side effects of having a thousand+ people in a small city space all protesting I'm absolutely okay with, even a few little breakout fights, I still would consider that a peaceful protest.
Blocking major roads using heavy machinery with no alternate route that can meet the needs of the local population, that goes beyond peaceful in my opinion.
P.S.: I've also watched live streams, I always do, I've seen BLM protests first hand for example, and all media always exaggerate a protest, so I'm the last person who'd believe the headlines at first. In this case though, I know even the truckers probably don't think it's that big a deal that they have their trucks blocking roads, but given the already stretched crisis of the Pandemic, the second order effects on supply is a big deal. Please keep protesting, but don't block those major roads. Move to smaller roads even if you want.
They know what's coming, when they decided to block those roads, they knew they didn't leave people a choice, they are cutting off a supply line, this is beyond protest, it's an attempt to say, if you want your supply back, do what we want. I'm sorry, that's beyond: We won't stop voicing our concerns and expressing our rights to protest.
A strike is a bunch of people refusing to work, not a bunch of people blocking access to unrelated essential services. They do things like overwhelm the 911 service with spurious calls and circling their trucks around schools. This is not a strike, this is outright terrorism. Someone will die (or already has) because they don’t have access to an essential service.
When one side shows up to block a street to draw attention, and the other shows up to loot a Best Buy to get a new PlayStation, it’s not really an apples to apples.
Funny how you seem to have forgot the highway shutdowns that BLM pulled in multiple cities, buildings burnt down with bodies later discovered inside. Yeah totally way more chill than some scary trucks idling in a street.
I recommend reading the bottom of the article and then googling the Maru Voice Canada the people who ran the poll. They are an organization who's members they poll. A rather small one at that with a probably very high self selection bias. Calling this a survey of Canadians is blatantly false.
“ The poll was conducted Feb. 9 and 10, 2022 among a random selection of 1,506 Canadian adults who are Maru Voice Canada panelists and is accurate within +/- 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.”
Two thirds doesn't seem like a particularly significant majority for such an authoritarian measure, and moreover the masses will always trade principle and liberty for a mere moment of catharsis--that's the whole reason we elect representative politicians: to be the prevailing cool heads who look out for our rights and liberties and not just the emotion of the moment.
These truckers did nothing other than grease the wheels of authoritarianism anyway.
This is the last real protest in Canada. Next time, these "emergency" powers will either be immediate or these new powers are just new permanent government powers.
2/3rds the citizens will practically be demanding that this never happens again.
A lesson in why Ben Franklin said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Greasing the wheels of authoritarianism by peacefully protesting—that seems a lot like victim blaming to me. Something is really wrong if our democracies can’t handle peaceful protest.
Admittedly that group of 11 people weren’t protesting peacefully, but one group acting in concert doesn’t indict the wider movement.
On the scope of major protests in the last several decades in western democracies, this one definitely is about as close to the “peaceful” extreme as any have been.
As a society, we should also strive for fairness in our rhetoric. It betrays our credibility to describe a riot which leaves a city in ashes as “mostly peaceful protest” simply because we agree with the cause and then to characterize these protests as “violent” because we don’t agree with them.
It's a manipulation of language, and one that is becoming more obvious to more people by the day. Remember, the internet never forgets. Remember when the definition of vaccine was changed? The internet remembers. These tactics don't work anymore.
Pierre Trudeau did far worse with the War Measures Act, which gave the government sweeping powers of arrest and detention without trial. Whether this will be a bad look on the government's part (from the public's perspective) depends on whether they can resolve this without incident. Unclear if the protestors will be able to dig in further if they're arrested for the various city laws they've broken.
I suspect that if Trudeau enforces Ottawa laws (which the police haven't), then stands down, this won't hurt public perception.
To add on to this, the Emergency Act was designed to replace the War Measures Act explicitly because of what Trudeau Senior did. It has a TON of caveats to it and requires ongoing review and is time limited. Nothing that is done under the Emergency Act is allowed to contravene the constitution.
The posters here decrying this as authoritarian don't understand anything about Canadian law, experience, or mindset and are going by what they're fed by their individual media source of choice. The War Measures Act invocation by Pierre Trudeau was one of the most singularly divisive moments (some would argue it was necessary, some would argue the opposite) in Canadian history, and made parliament realize they needed to rein in the Prime Minister's powers.
Yeeeeeah, I don't know about that. Anyone with their truck there risks forfeiting the asset that was used in commission of a crime. AKA their livelihood and likely most expensive asset. There is certainly not a bottomless pit of people wishing to do that.
Confiscating peoples' assets does not exactly engender you to a lot of political support. You're risking a massive loss in the next elections if you do that, just like how Democrats in the US are also facing huge electoral pressures on crime and COVID restrictions [1].
This idea that there's a crime wave seems to be pushed here and on reddit by month old accounts with no real proof. The reality is that crime is down in most places.
Lets look at San Francisco. I'm going to get my stats right from the San Francisco Police Department.
Homocide - Down 20%
Rape - Down 23.8%
Robbery - Down 20.7%
Assault - Down 8.8%
Human Trafficking - Down 83.3%
Burglary - Down 45.4%
Motor Vehicle Theft - Down 6%
Arson - Down 7.9%
Larceny Theft - Up 12.8%
Year over year the only type of crime that is up is Larceny Theft, and most of that is shoplifting. Everything else is down, and some of it by significant margins. There is no real basis for this "crime wave" people keep talking about. That pressure is really just right wing propaganda.
Quick Edit: When I published this the stats were only current to February 6th, but they were updated after I posted with data up to the 13th. So my numbers above are going to be slightly off, but you can confirm them by changing the timeframe to end on the 6th.
Most thefts (robbery, etc) are not reported now because people know police don't care. You also need to adjust your numbers for decreased activity (people stopped going out during COVID!). Restaurant reservations are down by 50% or more in SF [1] even despite reopening. If you use restaurant reservations as a proxy for foot traffic in general, all your metrics are strongly up when you adjust for foot traffic.
The idea that larceny (petty) theft doesn't matter is also a big reason why you think there's no crime wave. Petty theft is the crime most often encountered by everyday citizens. People don't like having their property stolen. I don't know why you refuse to acknowledge that.
> Most thefts (robbery, etc) are not reported now because people know police don't care
Underreporting has always been an issue with crime data [1], but the change in the Larceny rate doesn't seem like it's caused by an increase in underreporting. The change in reported Larceny from 2020 seems fairly correlated with COVID restrictions.
Here is the monthly Y/Y change in Larceny Theft Reported incidents for SF, for each month in 2020 vs. 2019:
Larceny did go up in 2021, especially at the end of the year when COVID restrictions started to lift, but is still down ~20% relative to 2019. Other crimes went up in 2020, but then decreased or flattened in 2021.
I think you may have a point about Larceny being encountered more, especially with foot traffic + tourism way down in many SF neighborhoods. I'm not sure how exactly to use Open Table reservations as a proxy for that, so it's hard to say whether it's relatively up or relatively down.
> Why? Crime is measured per capita, but you say it should be divided by 10,000 steps or something?
Why would petty theft and robbery be divided by population? My risk of getting my bike stolen is 0 or my phone taken at gunpoint if I stay inside my home. It is non-zero if I go out. And it increases the longer I stay out. So measuring crime per person-hour of going out makes intuitive sense. Restaurant reservations is merely an imperfect proxy for this.
> Straw man. Everyone knows that all crime creates anguish for the victim and is to be avoided. If a person compares the effects of the pandemic to the opportunity of types of crimes, it doesn't mean they love the idea of larceny. Come on. Better faith in arguing please
Except the causation for these crimes is lax prosecution caused by 1) DAs who are politically motivated and 2) Prop 47 / similar regulations in other states. Unemployment is at record lows and there's a record worker shortage driving up wages. You cannot possibly claim the "effects of the pandemic" are causing increased property crime when unemployment has been so low for so long.
> Better faith in arguing please
Ironic, coming from a 15 minute old account whose only comment is this response.
Can tell you this happened in my city. Anything not bolted down in your yard was getting stolen. Mayor gaslighting all of us saying the data doesn’t support a rise in property theft. The police had already publicly said they wouldn’t do any investigation for residential property loss under $10k, best you could do is report it and hope for recovery as piles of loot were periodically discovered. It caused a mild coordinated call on NextDoor for everyone to start reporting for the sake of the numbers but we knew we weren’t insane - we were living with it, and saw videos of it daily on NextDoor. In our town it’s calmed down quite a bit because it became an election issue, and looser bail policies were rescinded. Property crime still a problem though but nowhere near as bad. Here’s the basic law of the jungle - if you don’t have consequences for bad behavior, there will be more of it. Every city needs to decide where on the continuum they want to be, between Singapore and Liberia.
> best you could do is report it and hope for recovery
At the end of the day isn't that all you can do? File a report and hope for recovery? Is the complaint that you need to go to the station to file a report? That was already the reality for so many people. The police don't go to every neighborhood. Some neighborhoods, it's self-serve.
It's funny you say that because many people I know said they've simply stopped recording or responding to crime because everyone knows there will be no consequences for arresting somebody and the risk isn't worth arresting people in most cases.
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.
Because it's least susceptible to reporting bias, and being an extreme, also offers a base point for interpolation, to independently estimate numbers of lessor crimes, especially violent ones.
That's true, but if you don't focus on murders, 2020 was one of the lowest violent crime years on record looking at SF, CA as a whole, or the entire US, so 2021 having an increase in crime is nothing more than reversion to the mean.
If all crimes resulted in dead bodies in the aftermath, I would agree with your reasoning here. But even violent crimes, most of the time, do not produce a dead body.
So given how flawed that premise was to begin with, I don't think an explanation is needed for why your overall point is disingenuous at best.
I feel like from a criminological standpoint, we would have some understanding (or even a heuristic) about the reportedness of crimes and if they are rising/falling in proportion to reported crimes.
There is. For instance, you can look at other sources, such as insurance claims; people file them to get paid, they dont care if the party responsible is prosecuted.
People trying to hype up the crime thing deliberately ignore these sources because, as you can see, it allows them to make up as much crime as they can imagine and base their argument on that.
Motor vehicle theft is up, not down (even in your own data).
Infact from my own experience in Seattle area and the auto enthusiast groups I'm in, we've definitely seen an uptick in car prowling, smashed windows, cat thefts and outright vehicle/trailer thefts.
When I published this the stats were only current to February 6th, but they were updated after I posted with data up to the 13th. So my numbers above are going to be slightly off, but you can confirm them by changing the timeframe to end on the 6th.
Even for 2/6, the site says MVT was flat (0% change). But from what I have seen, policing has also taken a back seat during the pandemic especially for non-violent, non-urgent crimes.
And then I have to ask myself how is that possible in modern society? Train robberies seem shocking enough that they HAVE to be indicative of a broader crime wave. Is there something about the US context that I am missing?
>Union Pacific laid off an unspecified number of employees across the railroad system. Including members of its railroad-only police force. Despite record profits in the billions in the last quarter of 2021.
>According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
It's possible because Union Pacific thinks they can get taxpayers to pay for their security, and they can funnel more profits to their shareholders.
If you haven't heard the term before, this kind of response is called called "whataboutism":
> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.
I think it's worth reading the page - the definition is:
> Whataboutism ... is a ... logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument
You've charged hypocrisy, I don't see a direct refutation of the argument. Given that, it seems like this situation exactly fits the definition of 'whataboutism'?
If you want to talk about people whose lives have been taken away - there are far more Ottawa residents in the streets defying the police than there are truckers. This occupation has galvanized a small segment of the population, but there's a much larger group that was not politically active before and now they hate anti-vaxxers.
There was nothing to debate - the convoy does not have a cohesive message. Some of them are sovereign citizens. Some of them want the government to be dissolved. Some of them want some weird QAnon stuff. The only thing that unites them is shitting in the streets and driving around waving flags and honking.
Sounds a little silly to confiscate the assets of the people bringing the food to your table. That and the towies in the area are refusing to move any of the trucks.
Trudeau just looks weak at this point, and for a prime minister that got in because of his good looks and his dad's popularity it's not a good omen.
The vast majority of truckers understand the benefits of masks and vaccines to society as a whole.
The ones protesting are either uber-libertarians (and possibly also "sovereign citizens"), dis-educated, or have some sort of mental/emotional shortcoming where they will resist any sort of directive given to them even if it goes in their in their interest.
Sometimes people will lash out anyone who gives a helpful order because they feel like they're losing control.
Surprisingly, I still have food on my table even though none of these people have worked in 3 weeks. If you're going to have a strike, you need to actually have an impact.
Heavy equipment tow operators have recieved threats of violence, which is why at least some of them have not helped.
The conflation of "anti-vax" and "anti-mandate" is absolutely infuriating, and I'm sad and upset that so many people are falling for it.
It is perfectly possible to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, because the case for mandates makes no scientific sense. Forcing the vaccines on people will create more anti-vaxxers, not fewer! The whole thing is completely counterproductive.
No, I'm pretty sure we got to 90% vaccination because of mandates. People want things to go back to normal, and most people don't care one way or the other about getting a shot. Giving them a little incentive helps.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
$100 is "a little incentive". Firing people from their jobs, threatening their livelihood, making them unable to put food on their table or a roof over their heads, and ostracizing them from society is brutal coercion, no matter how nicely you dress it up. Getting people vaccinated that way is not informed consent in any way, shape or form.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
To preface this, I am not bought in on the way the mandates have been done. I think there's huge room for improvement, and it feels a bit ham-fisted rather than well thought through. That said...
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
Yes, that's the source I was using as well. And yes, your conclusion is correct, you are more likely to end up in the ICU if you are unvaccinated. Both these things are true at the same time: The vaccines work, and the majority of cases and hospitalizations are among the vaccinated.
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Ah - I think I see what you're saying. At the same time, I don't think I agree with your premise. The numbers in front of us seem to indicate it's not just slightly different, it's dramatically more likely to end up in the ICU as an unvaccinated person. With that in mind, one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations (acknowledging that's brushing aside the issue of forcing vaccines).
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
> one of the cheapest/lowest impact avenues to reduce ICU bed usage is via vaccinations
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!
So, instead of stopping and blockading, people just start driving the minimum legal speed everywhere. Totally legal, but would totally get the point across. And you don't need a truck.
Put the measures being protested directly up for a vote by the Canadian legislature (so they're not just executive actions), if they're not struck down the government should resign / do a no confidence vote, let people elect a new government. Let the people have their voice. If protests continue take actions that let them protest but reduce their ability to be disruptive.
With the current dynamics of the disease though, authoritarian medical requirements are making much less sense over time. Vaccination doesn't really help curb transmission much and omicron is considerably less dangerous than previous variants. SARS2 was originally pretty near the threshold where government might not need to do anything forced and the new variant and ineffectiveness of the vaccine against is is pushing it further lower.
He did win, but the majority voted against him. He won the plurality of seats, giving him a minority government, but with 33% of the popular vote. Another party got fewer seats with 34%. Canada’s electoral system sometimes works like that. Changing the system was one of Trudeau’s campaign promises in 2015!
If you want to argue about the popular vote, the NDP + Liberals combined got 48% of the vote. Electoral reform is only going to reflect Canada's desire to move further left - it would actually make it harder for the conservatives to win.
If the greatest flexibility a government can offer its people is the ability to vote every few years then that government does not work for the people.
I wasn't attempting to negate what you said, merely commenting on the inadequacies of a government that rigid.
I think protesting is not only valid, but necessary to keep centralized powers from growing too complacent. The growth of freedom globally and the birth of democracy was not on the back of elections or playing by the rules defined by the class of people in centralized power.
and obviously Canada's democracy has begun to erode if their leader is calling for a state of emergency completely bypassing the democratic process using old laws meant only to be enacted in extreme circumstances...certainly not to punish protests that have at worst blocked major roads for days - all the critical roads of which have already been cleared.
I think invoking the act is well within the democratic framework. The act mandates that there be an inquiry after to assess the validity etc. That will all come in time and I am sure lawsuits will follow too.
That said, there is definitely something going wrong with a portion of Canadian society because they trust Rebel News and Infowars more than any legitimate media organisation. Getting to the root of it will be crucial in figuring out what went wrong.
The conservative party forced a vote today to drop the mandates by the end of the month. It failed 151 to 185, with MPs voting along party lines (Conservatives and Bloc Québécois in favour; Liberals, NDP, and Green opposed) with a couple of abstentions.
Unless I misunderstand what the motion text means, it did not force a vote on mandates but on whether to come up with a plan to do so!
> That, given that provinces are lifting COVID-19 restrictions and that Dr. Theresa Tam has said that all existing public health measures need to be "re-evaluated" so that we can "get back to some normalcy", the House call on the government to table a plan for the lifting of all federal mandates and restrictions, and to table that plan by February 28, 2022.
You can't do that because 5000 people have blocked essential roads with big trucks. That's tyranny man.
Just because you support the end of restrictions doesn't mean you should support people getting what they want through illegal methods. This is supposed to be a democracy.
Canada just had an election, and the people pro-vaccine and pro-mandates were elected.
Yes, durect democracy and being allowed to all vote on all issues is a nice dream, but for now the system is a representative democracy. And it's not okay to force things through keeping people hostage.
Would you be similarly supportive if 5000 people blocked essential infrastructure with big trucks everytime they want something?
In my opinion, if we were to see a really large gathering, of the kind that BLM saw, then if say, ok, it does seem there's a lot of people who really care about this so maybe have a direct referendum, but this one hasn't met the threshold in my opinion.
The irony is this is exactly why the US is a republic and not a democracy.
Direct democracy is 100% mob rule but no one really cares to read the Federalist Papers or the mountain of thought that was put into this at the start of the US.
> Put the measures being protested directly up for a vote by the Canadian legislature (so they're not just executive actions), if they're not struck down the government should resign / do a no confidence vote
Wtf, you want them to vote, and if trudeau wins the vote, you want him to resign? Really a heads i win tails you lose sort of plan.
Besides,its a minority government, trudeau doesn't have to put it up for a vote, if he was going to lose, the opposition would put it to a vote.
And that's ignoring that 95% of what they are protesting isn't even federal juridsiction and has nothing to do with trudeau. He wouldn't be able to interfere if he wanted to.
There's not a "guarantee" but this is the well known behavior of the evolution of diseases. There is strong evolutionary pressure to become less deadly and more infectious.
Plus a future variant is likely to be even less affected by vaccination status.
> There's not a "guarantee" but this is the well known behavior of the evolution of diseases. There is strong evolutionary pressure to become less deadly and more infectious.
Do you know of any evidence that would support this hypothesis? Especially when talking about evolution over short periods of time (years, not centuries or millennia)?
An article in the Guardian published several months ago argued the opposite[0]; and while the Guardian is certainly no authority on scientific matters, and could well have its own narratives to push, their article suggests that this is not a well-known behaviour of pathogens.
The 1918 (Spanish) flu has descendants still circulating. During its peak it killed up to 5% of population (statistics vary, usually numbers land between 1 and 5%, in some places much more).
With all the covid talk, it is hard to quickly find a good source for the theory and verification of the evolutionary dynamics of diseases I mentioned, but as can be seen with variants (and how Omicron clearly wiped out Delta by overcompeting it) evolution of viruses absolutely does not need thousands or millions of years.
> but as can be seen with variants (and how Omicron clearly wiped out Delta by overcompeting it) evolution of viruses absolutely does not need thousands or millions of years.
Yes. I included thousands of years to accommodate the co-evolution of both the pathogen and the host, which, obviously, evolves at a much slower rate.
And since you mention how omicron wiped out delta, hadn't delta in its turn wiped out alpha, while being (I don't remember, was there a consensus on this?) a more dangerous variant?
If we break this down to basics, the selection pressure for a virus' survival is the host surviving long enough to spread the virus to another host, and ensuring enough hosts are available to continue this.
A new variant could kill every single last human and remain successful by infecting animal populations (SARS-COV-2 is doing the latter).
SARS-COV-2 and its descendants seem to me somewhat uniquely qualified to pull this off as they're one of the few viruses that are asymptomatically spread, meaning you can be infected, pass the virus on, then die for all it cares.
The above however, is not reason for us as a species to endlessly pursue locking down and pushing for restrictive measures when we see the situation clearing up and the above not being the case. When the time comes restrictions will be removed (this was already being discussed in a bunch of places) and hopefully we can just get back to the normal worries of the day such as impending climate disaster and war.
Firstly, he has a timeline for removing most restrictions, so there should be progress there, and secondly, why should he have to promise that? In case conditions change, say a much more deadly form of COVID, those restrictions may be needed. That demand seems unreasonable.
And the truckers and everyone else on their side feels that leaving the emergency powers in the hands of the government is unreasonable. Thus why the two respective sides are at an impasse.
He wouldn't have had to invoke emergency act if the Ottawa municipal police, the ones responsible for maintaining order in the city of Ottawa, did anything at all. They sat on their asses for weeks. The municipal leadership was non-existent, the ontario provincial leadership was non-existent, so what's left?
It really reminds me of the situation in the USSR in the 1991. Trudeau will call in the army, what the army will do is not what he expects I suspect. He is digging his own grave. Hopefully it will not come down to Ceaușescu resolution
On COVID issues the NDP, Bloc and Libs are aligned which is a significant majority. Also we just had an election and nothing changed. The Liberals with a minority is actually an indication that Canada wants to be further left than Trudeau, but we haven't gotten there yet.
The entirety of the Bloc just voted yea on the motion with the conservatives for the government to propose a concrete plan to end covid mandates today, along with 1 Liberal that Joel guy who dissented from his party.
>
> The act also allows for the military to be used as police, but several sources said that is not under active consideration.
Not a good look for Trudeau. This definitely looks like an authoritarian response to a loss of mandate. The protestors will dig in more, the response will become harsher, and the government will be in deeper trouble.