Move along
Canadian police on Saturday deployed pepper spray and stun grenades in a continuing effort to break up the blockade of trucks and demonstrators that has occupied downtown Ottawa for more than three weeks in a protest against pandemic protocols.
More than three weeks seems like ample time to get a point across. It seems like way too much time when the point in question is such a selfish and dimwitted point as refusing to get vaccinated during a pandemic.
In a tweet addressed to the truckers, police said: “We told you to leave. We gave you time to leave. We were slow and methodical, yet you were assaultive and aggressive with officers and the horses.”
The horses ffs. As if it’s their fault.
Man, if my husband finds out they were abusing animals, he’ll be right up there pepper-spraying them himself. Assholes who think their desires are the only things that matter.
I have yet to formulate a thorough opinion of these protests themselves, but I worry for the durability of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the face of the government’s actions. Canada has always been a good deal more authoritarian than it likes to believe, at least somewhat by design; usually this tendency has been well-balanced by Canada’s federalism, which is even more extensive than in the US and correspondingly limits how far Ottawa can overreach even when it has a majority government.
Note the “majority” here refers to a majority of seats in Canada’s main legislative body; because of Canada’s multiparty parliamentary system, in which the country is carved into hundreds of winner-take-all districts, it is quite rare that any government actually enjoys a mandate from the majority of Canadian voters. Historically this has allowed Canada to avoid, or at least to slow down, the death-spiral of partisanship which the US has fallen prey to for pretty much its entire existence.
But Justin Trudeau leads a “minority government”, made up of his Liberals and the New Democratic Party under Jasmeet Singh. Most other countries would call this a coalition government, but Canada calls it a minority government, reserving “coalition” for a…er, coalition of three or more parties. Under Canada’s own definition, Canada has had several minority governments, but has never had a coalition government. If we count Liberal votes as “for Trudeau” in a quasi-presidential sense, then Trudeau enjoys the leadership of a government after having won just under 33% of Canada’s voting public.
In fact, the Conservatives won about a percentage-point more of Canada’s voters in the last election, just a shade under 34%, and yet they have absolutely no voice in Canada’s government whatsoever outside of grandstanding in the House of Commons.
The last election saw about 60 percent voter turnout, which is actually quite low for Canada; in that light, Trudeau has won about one-in-five potential voters. And, again, with this mandate, he enjoys leadership of a government designed with no distinction between legislative and executive powers.
And, in response to the protests in Ottawa and elsewhere, Trudeau has declared a federal state of emergency for the first time in the nation’s history. This has effectively curtailed Canada’s constitution, of which the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an important subset. So far, Trudeau has used his emergency powers to disperse these protests, as well as to freeze the financial assets of certain citizens accused of funding domestic terrorism who claim simply to have given money to the trucker convoy. He has made many corrosive public statements about the protestors, and dissidents or skeptics in general, which would cause left-wing people to take to the streets themselves if a Conservative prime minister had said them about BLM protestors.
And, because the underlying “emergency” is a pandemic entering its third year, with an unknown end-date and no reason to expect the protests or their dissolution will have much of an affect on the course of the pandemic one way or another, there is essentially nothing but Justin Trudeau’s own sense of restraint to keep him from using his emergency powers more and more broadly, for a longer and longer period of time. Theoretically, there are safeguards against his taking things too far, but these rely upon Parliament holding him to account if he violates individual Charter rights in ways not already delineated by the Emergencies Act.
We will have to see how things develop. Most likely, the protesters will disperse, the pandemic will have another couple of waves before petering out regardless of what any one nation’s government does, and the next Canadian election (in 2025 if the NDP continues its support of the Liberals) will play out more-or-less normally. But Canadian society has been deeply scarred by the pandemic and the federal government’s response to it, and there is no guarantee that the Conservatives won’t be able to find an emergency of their own to declare, once they return to power.
Many years ago, I was crawling around a used bookstore and I found a text book on U.S. constitutional law. I bought it for a few dollars and started reading. Much of it was dry, and some was confusing, but I did learn a little bit about the legal machinery that undergirds our government.
One thing I was somewhat shocked to find was a series of cases–going back the 19th century–establishing extraordinarily broad police powers for the government to maintain public order and public health, at the cost of all kinds of individual freedoms and liberties. The rational for this is that it is senseless for the government to grant freedoms if the exercise of those freedoms will then lead to the destruction of the very government that protects those freedoms.
These cases remain good law. The people protesting mask mandates and vaccine mandates and howling about muh freedom really don’t have a clue.
DD @2:
My understanding is that most countries reserve the term “coalition government” for a formalized arrangement, often but not necessarily providing the second (and third, etc.) parties with actual cabinet posts or other positions. The NDP does not hold any positions in Cabinet and does not, I believe, have any formal “supply and confidence” agreement with Trudeau’s Liberals currently, and can “pull the plug” and bring down the government any time it chooses.
I’ve never heard a Canadian claim that a coalition requires more than two parties. In 2008-09, the Liberals and NDP had an agreement to form a coalition government to replace the Conservative minority government. They had a side agreement with the Bloc Quebecois to provide supply and confidence, but the BQ was not going to get actual membership in the government, and they weren’t considered part of the proposed coalition government. (Though certainly Harper’s Conservatives made much of the BQ’s offered support, lambasting the Liberals and NDP for making a deal with the separatists.)
Screechy,
Yes, of course, I misspoke and misanalysed how Canadian minority governments technically work. As you say, the NDP doesn’t have a formal arrangement with the Liberals, neither for cabinet posts nor a standing contract whose revocation would then collapse the government; nevertheless, in practice, the Liberals rely upon the NDP pretty much exclusively to pass bills into law, and would have to rely upon them in particular to pass a vote of no-confidence.
It is this sort of arrangement, where a party with a plurality falling short of a majority relies upon a party too small to be the “official opposition” to secure a majority of votes, which Canada calls a minority government. The lack of formal agreements to share power is what distinguishes a minority government from a coalition government. I suppose I took my vague memories of the 2008-2009 fiasco — which, you’ll recall, wound up in another Conservative minority for Harper, at least partly on the back of the public’s skepticism of a “European-style” coalition government — a bit too loosely.
Though, as it happens, I seriously doubt a minority government would long be supported by *two* smaller parties for very long without a formal arrangement, which would still be controversial in Canada and would probably lead to widespread calls for an election.