Unlike in the US, most Canadians are okay with trading some small freedoms for the greater good.

As a Canadian I have no problem with these power being used in this extreme case. After three weeks of occupying downtown Ottawa with the demand that the government be dismantled, they are no longer peaceful protesters. They are a group trying to remove a democratically elected western government. It makes perfect sense that funding for a group like that (a terrorist group) would be blocked.

I am glad that unlike the US, Canada is not allowing the far right to operate unimpeded. Homegrown right wing extremism is a growing problem in the US and is spilling over into Canada (Thanks Facebook) and I’m happy to see it being put down in this small way.

https://www.facebook.com/thomas.minnee/posts/101600891209174...

This time the answer is "It's useful to make your mortgage payment when one of your family members donates to a trucker protest that successfully applies pressure to the Canadian government, which then 'freezes' your bank account until the emergency legislation expires."

The quoted tweets point out that legal pornographers and legal gun shops have been subjected to similar, but less transparent, measures.

Of course the law says it applies equally to cryptocurrencies, but it really only applies to intermediaries. The point of cryptocurrencies is that they make you independent of intermediaries; you can possess your own coins instead of lending them to a bank or a stockbroker. This is part of what the Nunchuk response quoted explains.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408611

One comment about the article tho: Quoting Ezra Lavant immediately destroys the credibility of the author due to his obvious and direct connection to misinformation and over all general grift by attaching himself to right wing causes. There are lots of strong credible sources that could back up the argument of government overreach with the EA, but Ezra is not one of them.

This proves again and again that when the government implements a policy that is not based on science, the outcomes are very very bad.

The provisions expire ostensibly in 30 days, but what's pretty clear is there are exceptions for certain protests, and what I forsee occuring is there will be provocative so-called "counter protests," backed by the governing parties, which will result in "random" violence (some staged, some provoked), that will be used as a further pretext to extend and augment the powers into an indefinite emergency. (remind me: April 15, 2022) The playbook is a mix of colour revolution tactics with Arendt's description of totalitarian movements using absurdity and chaos via other movements to neutralize people at large.

In case you were still catching up, it would now seem uncontroversial that the Emergencies Act is at least how far they are willing to go to implement digital identity via vaccine passports. Simply, the Canadian government has metastasized. I'm not neutral at all, but I like to constantly reassess whether my views have predictive power.

The outs I see are:

a) tension fizzles and cools off, vaccine passports get pulled as promised in 2 weeks, act expires in 30 days, life goes back to mostly normal, pandemic finished like it is in dozens of other countries around the world.

b) narrative changes and now that truckers are moved, no reason to pull back vaccine passports anymore, and some excuse is contrived to maintain them - permanently divided society results.

c) government becomes histrionic and starts escalating reaction to imaginary threats, adds additional powers, starts purging society groups from financial system and employment - result is decade+ of strife.

d) government just says fuck it, Queen dies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and potentially France form a new post-national bloc with only nominal local rule, similar to the EU, but mainly operated by a transnational committee that implements a social credit system to engineer a utopian experiment that accepts a lot of casulties.

These are coarse grained scenarios, but as poles for likely outcomes, they're the waypoints I'm using. Most people think option a) is plausible, but I think their hope obscures their ability to see incentives. Option b) is a verifiable bet in a couple of weeks, and if b, then it's a quesiton of whether it's in service of c) or d).

There wasn't much/any honking, but there was some looting and burning.

The critics of the use of the Emergency Powers have been derided as cranks, and this is in line with the majority opinion of Canadians

Canada simply does not have a heritage of individual rights. Their country, their rules.

This will be an impossible subject to wade through due to the very charged reality of what has gone down. Preconceived perceptions are broken.

I respect Bill Maher's opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i72czkSUsM

I respect Jimmy Dore's opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNnGdv8ceM

One of the best objective timelines I have read on this subject to date: https://quillette.com/2022/02/21/the-ottawa-trucker-protest-...

* Quoting Ezra Levant is just... hilarious. His news rag has been banned from so many press events.

* We JUST had a federal election where these protesters could have made their point. Instead they chose to strangle the capitol and borders across the country.

* Over a thousand donors to the Convoy have been linked to the Jan 6th capitol demonstration and attack.

* 3 weeks of disruption to the nation's capital with horns blaring overnight, arson attempts, and weapons seizures is not "non-violent". There is not much difference between storming a capital and strangling one. Police and Military members were involved in creating supply lines and creating an occupation. And there were plans to block airport cargo terminals. The economic impacts across the nation are in the billions of dollars.

* The freezing of finances IS NOT retroactive, thanks to our charter, meaning if you donated to the convoy before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, you won't be targeted. The only accounts were “individuals and companies suspected of involvement in illegal acts,” such as “influencers in the illegal protest in Ottawa” and vehicle owners and drivers “who did not want to leave the area impacted by the protest.”

* It's hard to see the act as a tyrannical overreach if it can be challenged in court and has a public inquiry

* Police didn't enforce the law which is why the feds needed to intervene. The public inquiry (required by the act) should reveal why police forces were unable to shut down these protests earlier, and where the money was flowing. If donor lists are to be believed, there was a significant amount of foreign funding into this operation, as well as members of the public service.

Personally, I don't think that a government which stamps out protest and bank accounts of political rivals is anywhere but at the bottom of the slope. I've lived in Africa and I've seen how this goes.

What _would_ make a pattern? Is it possible to make any negative predictions without falling into the Slippery Slope?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've also had to ask you this kind of thing in the past.

There are probably very few cases where the government implemented a rule or regulation or tax or anything where it was eventually rolled back. The government has a long and documented track record of incrementally expanding its reach and power.

The US homeland security act will never time out. The Canadian emergencies act will likely also continue on forever, but the act doesn't actually have to get worse to BE worse. The act is already dictatorial. The controlling government will just figure out how to apply the emergencies act more liberally against political opponents. That's how it will get worse.

And they even helped with convenient tax credits for taking their preferred modes of transportation! (spending tax dollars)

strawman fallacy (or "whataboutism" if you prefer (I don't))

https://twitter.com/rahulbetgeri/status/1494963031847337985

> 1) About half of those people in hospitals were vaccinated.

Considering Ontario is 90% 12+ fully vaccinated and 85% 5+ fully vaccinated[1], this means somewhere in the neighbourhood of say 15-18% of the population represents 50% of our hospitalizations, likely a lower percentage, since as you note this tends to hospitalize people in older cohorts.

> 2) Vaccine mandates do not considerably improve vaccination update, especially among elderly who benefit the most from vaccination.

Firstly, Ontario's elderly are massively vaccinated. 80+ is 99.99%, 70-79 is 99.99%, 60-69 (which I wouldn't consider elderly these days) is 97.37%.[4] This isn't due to anything very recent either, the rates have been 90%+ two doses for the 70+ crowd since August of last year.

Secondly, if this were true, you would not expect to see upticks in vaccinations coinciding with mandate implementations. Yet in [1], in November of 2021 you see a clear uptake in vaccination doses administered. This coincides roughly when 5+ were authorized for vaccination[2], as well as when federally regulated industries began requiring it.[3]

You can see from the raw data in [4] first doses between Nov 1 2021 and Jan 1 2022 was 468,443 for 5-11s, 28,257 for 12-17s, and 220,641 for 18+. Nearly a third of all first doses during the time period when 5-11 just became newly able to be vaccinated came from Ontario's adults. There was an 88.5% vaccination rate among 18+ at the start of that time period and there was a noticeable dip in vaccinations due to the holidays (you can see this in the booster #s too). You can question the motivations of those people but I think the numbers at least suggest that the mandates do have a part to play in driving people to get vaccinated.

[1]: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data

[2]: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-e...

[3]: https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2021/10/manda...

[4]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...

2) “Trust in government” is something that is thrown around but mostly it is speculation. It was said that Sweden didn't need mandatory lockdowns because Swedes trust in the government but people in the UK do not. And yet, with vaccinations both countries have done well without vaccine mandates. Is Canada really so much different from the UK? I really doubt it. It is probably more similar to the UK than to the USA.

My original argument was that vaccination uptake by elderly is that matters the most. And data clearly shows that it is true. For example, Israel despite strict vaccine mandates have poor vaccination uptake by elderly. It could be even argued that vaccine mandates may decrease vaccination uptake by elderly. As you say, Canada introduced vaccine mandates when majority of elderly where already vaccinated so that there was no noticiable slowdown in this group but other countries may have even made this worse by pointless vaccine mandates.

I remember that idea and unfortunately it is not possible to reach herd immunity with vaccines that do not protect from infection. You need to update the current scientific knowledge. That's why I am saying that vaccine mandates are anti-scientific because they ignore hard scientific facts and are based on la-la land ideas.

Reputable source or it didn't happen.

By contrast, most of the residential neighborhoods in Manhattan easily clear 100k people, and are not as segregated in terms of business and residential streets.

>Although the Bill of Rights remains in effect, many of its provisions were superseded by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. And unlike the Bill of Rights, the Charter is part of the Constitution — the highest law of the land.

>The Charter can be limited by the notwithstanding clause, also known as the override clause. Section 33 permits federal, provincial and territorial governments to temporarily bypass Charter rights in section 2 and sections 7 to 15.

Section 1 (probably what would make almost any emergency measure stand in court since "reasonable limits" is almost always judged in favor of what the state deems is reasonable) says:

>1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society

Section 33 (Not-withstanding clause, not used in this case but just goes to show how worthless the charter is as a bill of rights) :

>33. Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 [those sections make up for most of the core basic human rights]

Since 1982, and part of our constitution: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html

“ Under the Emergencies Act, a declaration of an emergency by the Cabinet must be reviewed by Parliament.[33] Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill of Rights, and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

Not a risk, a reality.

It's so much more exciting to believe the government is freezing the accounts of political opponents than the boring facts about how crowd funding hasn't been subject to normal anti-fraud and anti-terrorism regulations.

I think I generally agree but I’m this instance it didn’t look the Canadian federal government really overreached. I think it might have been a better look if they had gone after the police chief first who was refusing to enforce the law, and try and get local government to do the enforcement but after three weeks in a residential area I can see how leadership would be concerned about escalation

When they were deemed unable to is when the emergency decree went into effect.

And the Canadian government stated that some portion of the protests were either part of or linked to US militia groups:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/16/ottawa-blockad...

Imo, the government must provide instructions for how to legally protest in Ottawa.

(No I don't support the illegal activities. But the government in stopping illegal activities is also preventing peaceful protests.)

> 15.2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

People who donated had all their money confiscated by Castro.

I understand why Freeland would not want to outright say "we want the permanent power to freeze funds with no recourse" - but that's the only conclusion I could reach based on that clip.

Keep in mind, the government had the power to seize/freeze assets, before this Emergency Act, as long as they had a court order. However, that low bar seemed to be too high a hurdle so the Liberals want to make this permanent.

In practice, the government simply kept voting to extend its emergency powers until it passed a piece of legistlation that allowed it to keep the relevant powers from the emergencies act indefinitely.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/truck-convoy-downtown-...

We live in a society, your personal space and freedom intersects with the personal space and freedom of others. So yo have to compromise and jab is nothing too demanding. Especially when billions of people have already done it.

> CTV cited Bauder saying that he hoped the signed MoU would convince Elections Canada to trigger an election, which is not constitutionally possible. In this pseudolegal document, CU called on the "SCGGC" to cease all vaccine mandates, reemploy all employees terminated due to vaccination status, and rescind all fines imposed for non-compliance with public health orders.[46] If this failed, the MoU called on the "SCGGC" to dissolve the government, and name members of the CU to form a Canadian Citizens Committee (CCC), which is beyond the constitutional powers of either the Governor General or the Senate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Planning

They released an MOU at the start of this that explicitly called for the resignation of the current government if they were not willing to immediately lift the Covid19 mandates. In the case of a refusal to lift the mandates, it demanded that a new government be formed of representatives from the Senate and, incredibly, representatives from the convoy.

Look at what they did in Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan (200+ dead). If Ukrainian people resorted to peaceful protests, the pro-Russian government would have easily cracked down and suppressed the protests.

If you want another even more brutal example - look at the Tiananmen Protests. Do you think peaceful protest will convince an authoritarian communist government to magically give up its powers?

The government rarely listens to its people (yes that includes democratic countries). If you want the government to listen, you gotta make a lot of noise.

You could say the same about the PATRIOT act, which has been around for a little under 2 decades.

Many of the more hardcore members of the convoy have moved just outside of town to Arnprior and a nearby truckstop. [2][3]

[1] https://twitter.com/RevengeBunny/status/1495677761578536960 [2] https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1495847634321514498?s=2... [3] https://twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/149549454587381761...

There's varying levels of "uncomfortable", and a question of who is being made uncomfortable.

If a protest is permanently damaging the hearing of regular people who are not in positions of leadership for 21 days straight, and subjecting them to significant harassment, some of them a botched arson attempt, and a whole litany of other assaults as have been documented in Centertowne Ottawa, I would argue it is more akin to holding them hostage.

You want politicians or big business to react but you’re pissing off small businesses and civilians. Even if I 100% agree with your protest, I don’t want you to blare loud music and block off roadways and generally be aggressive and obnoxious. In fact this kind of thing makes ordinary people go against you.

If you can’t target the politicians and big businesses directly, if you want to get the people’s support, bring attention to your issue. If it’s a serious issue people will take interest themselves. Once you some support, then you can go out and protest and lead a huge rally, but don’t blatantly piss off bystanders.

Because it didn’t rise to the level of treason?

For the entire rest of your comment I can’t respond until you let me know what was the appropriate response for the government here. So far you’ve implied they should have done nothing, and explicitly threw treason out as another possibility. Is there any step the government could have taken that was appropriate in your view other than do nothing, charge treason, or capitulate entirely to the protestors?

Occupy Wallstreet was treated harder for less. Tough truckers fearing a needle, hard to believe.

Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement basically just took over city parks and fed people. Occupy was basically a good. CHAZ is a kind of rolling disaster that involved over-anxious security killing a guy who'd stolen someone's car. As a leftist who knows people who were involved with it, I would say CHAZ was a very bad thing.

Of course, a democratic society has to decide what sorts of disruptions are acceptable and which have to be stopped. Of course such a society is going to do that. Otherwise, the first extremist cult to field enough armed people to seize the state will win.

...just because you disagree with the message or the METHODS(emphasis added)...

If the trucker convoy was basically thugs who were breaking the law because they thought they could and because they thought doing this would force the rest of the nation to bow to their demands, I don't think anyone has an obligation to have the least respect for their efforts.

So sure, we can call both protests, but the important thing is that this was also a foreign-funded occupation. So there is no value in comparing this with the protests for both left- and right- wing causes that Ottawa sees on a weekly basis. Protests that get a permit, last an afternoon, and then go home and lets people live their lives without being harassed.

I can show you the longterm studies of those you mentioned. But the first long term study for these new vaccines are due in 2024.

In the end these kids are part of an experiment that we all hope goes well.

Most of anti-abortion activists are vaxxed. They are promoting the idea that your body society's choice. Do you stand with that crowd?

Nothing is sacred or revered, to the extent that religion is being replaced by diy mysticism, ideology, politics, or Great Causes, be it climate or BLM or MAGA.

In my mind, the solution is cultural. We need shared values and deep understanding of the principles that govern our countries. We need good faith debate and review of outdated laws, revision or excision of bad ideas - racial language, weird moral errata, and finally a sufficiently detailed and rigorous regulation of novel technology that older concepts fail to account for.

Social media, adtech, and search engines aren't common carriers, but legislation shouldn't try to shoehorn regulation of platforms and communities into pre-internet legal paradigms. It's way past time for regulation and legislation of digital liberties.

The 2nd amendment in the US didn't account for nuclear weapons. The war on drugs and the current global legal system around drugs didn't account for human nature and civil liberty. Section 230 and phone companies and cable TV aren't concepts that map properly to the modern internet, and we'll probably see radical changes at an increasing rate. Nailing down basic things like digital privacy rights, penalizing surveillance, rewarding innovation and fixing patents and copyright are crucial, but apparently it doesn't test well, so nobody is fundraising for that platform.

Canada is not bad, but things can break down rapidly. Trudeau will fail on the side of authoritarian control, so any actual damage resulting from that should be fodder for debate on refining the system and protection from abuse. And if no damage is done, recognizing and reinforcing the fail-safe structures in government is probably necessary.

Stop conflating anti-vaxx with anti-mandate. There are plenty of vaccinated people who participated in the protests because they think mandates are a step too far. The mandates for truckers were the original trigger for the protests, and the primary demand was to remove them.

Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.

>destroying property

What is the property that was destroyed by the protest in question?

Every protest in history has “done something illegal” like blocking roads or disrupting access to public spaces, at an absolute minimum. So if you have the right to protest, then you have the right to do those things that would otherwise be illegal within the context of a protest, or you don’t have the right to protest at all.

If the prime minister didn't paint 40% or more of Canadians a certain way so many people wouldn't have joined.

The quote you brought out does not say that an illegal protest is the basis for using emergency powers. It says that an illegal occupation is the basis.

We have had many many "illegal" protests where streets have been blocked temporarily and there were no calls to break out the emergency act.

Something to the effect of "Democracy is the idea that the common man knows what he wants, and deserves to get it, good and hard."

If a group of people, in a free and fair election, decide to elect in radical, repressive Islamists, is that not democracy functioning as intended?

Kind of a hard thing to prove. I don't feel safe due to climate destruction. Can we invoke the Emergencies Act against the Canadian fossil fuel industry and the automotive parts manufacturers to make me feel better?

Feeling unsafe is often invoked lately to restrict the rights of others. I don't believe this is sufficient in a larger context.

Why? Canada already has a strong conservative movement, and NAFTA makes it damn easy for US-based companies to do as they please.

This reeks of the same forces that got Trump elected. Which would be a mix of billionaires, Russian money, and anyone who has an axe to grind against Canada, e.g. China (for the Huawei, et al, conflicts).

I don't know what agenda you have but I will no longer be responding to you since you don't seem to be able to interact in good faith.

The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.

Or, to others, a nightmare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

But that's not what Canada did, is it? They not just remove the protest they froze bank accounts of supporters. That's not democracy. That's a government very very threatened by the protest.

If Canada does not wipe the slate clean and vote away every single politician who was culpable in this, then Canada is not the place it's been advertised to be.

Thanks for the perspective.

The 1950s were not nightmarish for anybody actually living in them. Racial minorities, though still mistreated, were mistreated a heck of a lot less than in decades prior and had much more economic opportunity though they were starting from lower on the ladder on average than white people.

That economic opportunity is what everyone wants back.

The fact that you can consider the 1950s in the US a "nightmarish historical moment" is nonsensical, to put it very, very charitably.

This particular lynching was obviously not the only proof of this reality in the decade.

You are defending them; your 'context' is simply how these particular murderers justified their actions. The real context is that white people could kill black people with impunity. The context is not that black people kept on making mistakes.

Let's be clear: there is no legal justification for using the emergencies act.

The broad powers the government has granted to police curtail Charter rights across the country.

This risk of abuse is high.

The emergency declaration should be immediately revoked.

https://twitter.com/cancivlib/status/1495932825752809472

"Fully 61 percent of Americans said they approve of renewing the Patriot Act's provisions to allow for continued collection of phone data, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Monday, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/01/41123...

>The greatest concerns seem to be from Americans and this is particularly bad on Reddit, where the Canadian subreddit has been captured by right-leaning Americans mainly.

Source for this?

I suspect Canadians aren't concerned because for the most part Canadians have lived a very comfortable existence for a very long time due to the nature of our geopolitical privileges. I think the hyperbole tossed around regarding the convoy and blockade illustrate this.

I think Canadians have more faith in our institutions, particularly the courts, to remain apolitical.

Much of the dysfunction of the USA partly comes from it's size and it's economic, climatic & historical diversity compared to Canada. Canada is significantly smaller economically, historically and population wise. It is also a country that has had consistently cold winters, which creates cultural values that forces you to save for the winter, which makes everyone work better together, which is something you see similar with Scandinavian countries [0].

The USA has many climates that make fairly different cultures in subtle ways. Canada works better because it's smaller and accidents of history, not because they don't have free speech. Canada is more american than they feel comfortable with, and this creates a unease that makes them feel like they need to differentiate themselves on minor difference, much like two twins.

[0] If your wondering why russia doesn't work like scandinavia, one reason why is hundreds of years of brutal mongolian rule, while scandinanvia avoided that trauma.

I guess it's just natural for canadians to have this weird smug inferiority complex towards the US but you have to remember that our government admitted to committing a genocide (still ongoing) barely 2 years ago. Also on average even a majority government rarely gets more than 34% of the total votes. But I'm legimately curious as to what parts of our system you see as being so healthy?

Btw saying that the majority of canadians are not concerned at all about setting the precedent of suspending charter rights over a protest is just a complete self own if it was true and I don't think it is. Well at least I hope it isn't

I think this bears repeating. Especially when one of the protest organizers tried to cite their "first amendment rights" in court: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/tamara-lich-bail-heari...

Ultimately the true test for the existence of guaranteed rights is if those who you and the majority of people absolutely hate and despise have their rights guaranteed and protected in the same way and with the same vehemence as those of the average Joe.

A right lives and dies by our willingness to protect it for those who we hate.

If they were planning an attack on a group of people based on their race it would qualify, but that’s far from this.

You can be against immigration (to protect your culture, the gains of your country) without being against individual of any race.

Most Canadians I imagine live abroad for economic reasons. But that in itself is a failure of our institutions; an economy is a reflection of the set of rules created by the government.

Anyhow, some examples:

- Police, it's obvious they can't do their jobs. Between inability to clear protests, all our cities being taken over by crackheads, it's failed.

- Courts: basically catch and release. Murder regularly gets plead down to manslaughter with pathetic sentences

- Municipalities: make starting a physical business damn near impossible. Tons of red tape and random fees, then you get taxed to hell because homeowners can't possibly pay for their share...

- Healthcare: it's a joke. Worst of any country in our income bracket yet Canadians inexplicably think it's not shit.

- Bank of Canada: literally went out and said they're propping up house prices

- Feds: literally said they are bringing in immigrants to reduce wage inflation ie. Prevent wage growth. Trudeau senior capped wage increases for awhile while in power...

Tons more examples of failed institutions in this country...

So tell me, why don't you live in Canada?

Trudeau is not making friends, but given a lack of strong leadership from any other party, you may not see them able to pull any more support out. The only poll that matters is the election and it's probably fair to say we don't know what will happen.

The protests may be a distant memory by then. And if one of the parties gets a handle on housing prices, that could swing things.

The outcome of those deliberations will be to some extent obscure and subject to yet further interpretation and arguments.

That doesn't in, and of itself, make democracy stronger.

I would argue that the use of this Act has already weakened democracy in Canada because it shows that the only response the political systems has to a very minor disruption is to use acts that everyone understood to be for much more extreme situations.

This has already deepened many people's cynicism about the idea of this form of government.

I would argue that laws only mean what they are interpreted to mean by a particular governmental body at a particular time.

And you can in addition have a coherent, clear and easily interpretable body of laws and measures which result in a society which lacks many of the features of what people like to imagine is a "democracy".

The difference is that in liberal democracies, the executive branches has to convince a court before they can act. eg. getting a warrant before doing a search, or getting a conviction before imprisoning someone. The approach of "shoot first, you can sue us in court later" makes a mockery of this.

>Banks are private entities. They freeze accounts engaged in illegal activities regularly. The US does too - here's one random citation. [1]

They're both bad. This is just slightly worse because the government is directing businesses into targeting their political enemies.

Much like how taking someone's car, even if you plan to give it back one day, maybe, if you think they deserve it, is still theft.

Because banks do it under duress, it's really the government that is doing this, not the bank itself.

Yes, it does. The donations were specifically to fund an activity that had been deemed illegal. Similar to the other things tracked by FINTRAC.

I have seen only one claim of a donor being targeted, and quite frankly, I didn't trust the source, but it is possible. The RCMP issued a statement [1] yesterday clarifying that the only information they had provided to banks was regarding organizers and trucks blocking the street (both groups were made explicitly aware that their behaviour was illegal and would have consequences).

[1] https://blockade.rcmp.ca/news-nouvelles/ncr-rcn211130-s-d-en...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Transactions_and_Rep...