[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[Jacob]

So Alberta and Sasketchewan are ending mandates and restrictions.

Meanwhile, BC is extending the vaccinine mandate to include dentists, chiropractors and other regulated health professionals. I guess neither Dr. Henry nor the NDP government were impressed by the convoy sympathizers and their BC shenanigans.

Ontario apparently also says it's "not yet" time to lift vaccine or masking mandates.

[saskganesh]

Trudeau has a  weak hand, because he called an unnecessary, opportunistic, election during a public health crisis. Dude and his handlers are out of touch. Of course, his opponents are no better, so we have here wacko csa/ nazi liking fringist's doing a slow moving coup ...  and everyone in charge is a coward.

Boris Yeltsin was a drunk, and generally mediocre, but he had the balls to stand on a tank and risk actual sniper fire. He showed up.Moscow 91.

I am not seeing anyone show up. Except for Conservatives. O'Toole was hence deposed, and the rest either want to ride the 10% pony and not represent the majority of Canadians, or they just want to be quiet and act busy. These are gross people and these are bad times.

[Jacob]

What would showing up look like sask?

[viper37]

It was quite the White Supremacist coming out, gotta say.

Link me.

https://twitter.com/JoelLightbound?s=20

not him, Poilievre. You keep saying he's a fascist, so I want to see what he said.

[Grey Fox]

It was quite the White Supremacist coming out, gotta say.

Link me.

https://twitter.com/JoelLightbound?s=20

not him, Poilievre. You keep saying he's a fascist, so I want to see what he said.

Oh, I meant Joel with the coming out.

Currently the anti vax and mandate movement (which PP and Joel are part of) is using White supremacist rhetoric and talking points.

*Division*

[viper37]

It was quite the White Supremacist coming out, gotta say.

Link me.

https://twitter.com/JoelLightbound?s=20

not him, Poilievre. You keep saying he's a fascist, so I want to see what he said.

Oh, I meant Joel with the coming out.

Currently the anti vax and mandate movement (which PP and Joel are part of) is using White supremacist rhetoric and talking points.

*Division*

I don't like what I heard of PP, I don't agree with everything LB said, but that has nothing to do with White Supremacy.  And I still don't think "The federal government should increase provincial healthcare transfers" = "We must close our borders and reject all immigration here to replace us".  But I'm old and hard of hearing; also, english not being native tongue, it's possible they really sound the same for some people.

[crazy canuck]

The non nutter argument is that Trudeau should not have made vaccination a political issue during the last election.  That is the view of a lot of medical health professionals.  He made not masking and not getting vaccinated a political choice which is counterproductive.

He also said the Liberal party should increase health transfers to the provinces.  That won't make him popular in some circles.

Where do you think that would be unpopular?

[crazy canuck]

What would showing up look like sask?

This is an example of what it might look like

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mark-carney-end-freedom-convoy-ottawa-state-of-emergency/

[OttoVonBismarck]

I find this whole situation bizarre. I sympathize somewhat with people annoyed by the current pandemic restrictions on both sides of the border--I think many of the restrictions have gone long past how long they should have been maintained, albeit the omicron surge kind of muddied the reasonableness of dialing them back the last two months. But it's just a basic function of government to keep the transportation system functioning and such, the Canadian government (both the provincial / municipal governments involved and the Federal government) complete surrender to the sort of semi-trucks as roadblock societal disruption that you used to see cartels imposing on Mexico is very insane to me. Is there simply no viable police power in Canada to fix this?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Like this quote is very, very bizarre to me:

"You can't arrest your way out of the choices that people are making. ... The best thing is for them to make the decision to leave," a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent in Alberta, Roberta McKale, told reporters Wednesday at one of the protest sites near Coutts. "And they've got to go."

I agree just mass arrests won't magically fix angry people, nor will it prevent all of this. But semitrucks are physical, real world objects. Seizing them, towing them away and impounding them (and perhaps even pursuing legal options that would let the government declare them forfeited by their owners) are concrete actions you can take. Semitrucks don't grow on trees, you start removing them they don't just magically grow back.

[Jacob]

I find this whole situation bizarre. I sympathize somewhat with people annoyed by the current pandemic restrictions on both sides of the border--I think many of the restrictions have gone long past how long they should have been maintained, albeit the omicron surge kind of muddied the reasonableness of dialing them back the last two months. But it's just a basic function of government to keep the transportation system functioning and such, the Canadian government (both the provincial / municipal governments involved and the Federal government) complete surrender to the sort of semi-trucks as roadblock societal disruption that you used to see cartels imposing on Mexico is very insane to me. Is there simply no viable police power in Canada to fix this?

That is a question a number of Canadians are asking themselves as well.

Is it that our politicians are simply not making the decision to instruct the polce to take decisive action?

Is it that the decision is purely a policing decision, and our police leadership is - for some reason - deciding not to act against the protestors? If so, why is that?

Is it that our police lack the capability to deal with protestors with... trucks? If so, what will it take to give them that capability? What sort of reinforcement is available?

Because yeah... it's insane.

[Jacob]

Like this quote is very, very bizarre to me:

"You can't arrest your way out of the choices that people are making. ... The best thing is for them to make the decision to leave," a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent in Alberta, Roberta McKale, told reporters Wednesday at one of the protest sites near Coutts. "And they've got to go."

I agree just mass arrests won't magically fix angry people, nor will it prevent all of this. But semitrucks are physical, real world objects. Seizing them, towing them away and impounding them (and perhaps even pursuing legal options that would let the government declare them forfeited by their owners) are concrete actions you can take. Semitrucks don't grow on trees, you start removing them they don't just magically grow back.

The excuse we've been offered, so far, is that the companies with the capability to tow trucks are unwilling to do the business of towing the trucks because they fear angering the trucking industry and/ or because they support the protestors.

It still seems like it's something that a modern state should be able to overcome.

[Sheilbh]

In the UK where we've had wildly different approaches by police to different protests, my theory with the police dealing with protestors is that their willingness to confront/take on protests is very closely linked to how much they expect resistance and violence back at them. Basically if it's a relatively small, peaceful, mixed gender/age group they are more willing to be confrontational than with a crowd that's big, restless, young or male. I'm not sure it's a great approach to public order policing - but I wonder if that's playing into it here too?

Obviously the exception is if the crowd turn violent towards the police first in which case the police seem to go in pretty hard.

[OttoVonBismarck]

FWIW the 1/6 coup attempt being an outlier, at least in the U.S. most right-wing protesters don't actually put up much of a physical resistance to direct police action. Most right-wing protesters are cowards that focus their violence on bystanders or non-police actors that they know are not armed. Even the 1/6 protesters were almost certainly only willing to do what they did because of a series of very stupid decisions by both the Capitol Police and some Federal military officials that left the Capitol surrounded with no effective barricade and an insanely understaffed police presence, making the ratio of protesters to police so extremely bad it wasn't seen as risky to push through them.

That being said, I understand the reticence, but I'm highly skeptical that if the police start removing these trucks the response by almost any of these goons is going to be violence.

It's kinda weird tow companies would refuse to work with government. In the U.S. a huge portion of a tow company's revenue is from government contracts, risking those would be seriously ruinous. But yeah, even with tow companies refusing I like to think the world's 9th largest economy could figure out an answer--maybe buying its own tow trucks and having government employees with heavy equipment training use them. Like is it just really the case the country of Canada cannot remove a few hundred vehicles parked illegally? I find it very hard to believe it's can't versus politicians are afraid to do so.

[Jacob]

Nothing I disagree with there Otto. It's hard to understand why accept that the hammer isn't coming down.