It’s always good when a federal court tells a federal government that it shouldn’t have done some horrible autocratic thing.
Much better had it never been done in the first place — but at least now there is official acknowledgement and, hope against hope, a chance that it won’t recur.
Hey, a guy can dream.
According to a ruling by Canadian Federal Court Justic Richard Mosley, although truckers’ protests a few years ago against insane pandemic mandates “reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order” (he seems to be forgetting that the government unacceptably broke things first), invoking of an Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.”
No, it doesn’t bear those hallmarks. There “was no national emergency justifying invocation of the Emergencies Act.”
The truckers were clogging traffic to bring attention to a plight caused by the government. That’s it. The truckers weren’t nuking cities or anything. But in reply, the government nuked the rights of truckers by, among other things, freezing their bank accounts and even penalizing people who had donated five bucks to help the truckers out.
Truckers were protesting the fact that they were not being allowed to decide for themselves whether to risk an experimental vaccine. The government banned them from crossing the Canada–U.S. border unless they got the shot.
Luckily, Canada’s federal government has announced that it has seen the error of its ways and — ah, who am I kidding? It is appealing the decision.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
1 reply on “The Vaxxers’ War on Truckers”
Every action is a bit of a gamble. If we want to dissuade people — such as public officials — from engaging in actions of some sort, then those people must made to expect to be worse-off if they engage in actions of that sort.
Having some particular instance of such action fail to achieve all its objectives is not enough. Trudeau &alii knew in advance that courts might rule against them. But they saw the gamble as worth the risk. The plausibility of each possible cost was not sufficient to stop them. Public officials will do something similar in the future, unless the social order acts against the officials in this case with sufficient force that expectations shift.
I don’t expect the courts or the voters to do so.