Tag: Canada

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crime and punishment general freedom

Precedented Prosecution?

Canada, Covid, truckers, punishment, tyranny

“The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime,” wrote Arthur White-​Crummey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last week, “as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.”

The “Ottawa truck convoy” is what they are calling the big anti-​totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare. 

“Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-​McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber,” we learn, and if you raise your eyebrows over such stiff sentences — for “mischief” cases! — you’re not alone. Chris Barber’s lawyer called the prosecutor’s demanded punishment, “cruel and unusual.” 

The exact charges against the two convoy leaders are “mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order” (Barber) and “mischief alone” (Lich). The prosecutor argued that these people did a lot of damage.

But it wasn’t property damage, or burning buildings, or even littering. The convoys stalled traffic around government buildings and made a lot of noise — and Barber is acknowledged by the prosecutor to have worked with police to move trucks out of residential areas. 

Barber and Lich wanted a clean and pointed protest. 

Barber’s lawyer noted that the organizers and hooligans of the “Black Bloc” protesters at Toronto’s 2010 G20 summit “caused extensive property damage, including upending police cars and smashing storefronts, but received comparatively light sentences of under two years.”

And remember, even the CBC article used the word “unprecedented.”

Traditionally, however, a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful.

Tyrannical governments.

So we now know how to categorize the Canadian government.

Very precedented.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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privacy

Big Ugly Border Bill

Canada, surveillance, privacy, metadata

The price of liberty may be more than eternal vigilance. Must we also employ all-​knowing vigilance? Encyclopedic knowledge of all possible dirty tricks freedom’s enemies may employ?

One such is burying the latest assault on liberty in legislation about an unrelated matter in hopes that nobody will notice.

In Canada, a controversial effort to sabotage online privacy has wormed its way into a bill supposedly about strengthening border security: the Strong Border Act (Bill C‑2).

It’s not exactly new, since, as Reclaim the Net reports, it’s something “law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s.”

As with populations south of the border, the people themselves hate such interference. “Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court,” observes Ken Macon, “the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.”

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians have a right to expect that their subscriber information will be kept private. In 2023, the courts affirmed that users’ IP addresses were also entitled to protection. Investigators couldn’t simply rummage through a Canadian’s subscription details and surfing history without a warrant.

But the new legislation would entitle authorities to make warrantless “information demands” on service providers.

If this legislation ostensibly about the border is enacted, service providers would, on demand, have to identify particular users and whether the provider possesses his transmission data. The actual data itself would not have to be handed over, but Macon stresses that permitting such indirect searches would “effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.”

Vigilance, indeed, knowing our governments’ lust for omniscience about us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets international affairs

The 51st State?!?!

Canada, United States, border, trade, economics

“What I’d like to see?” confessed the president. “Canada become our 51st state.”

Why?

“We give them military protection,” he offered. 

Then things got weird.

“We don’t need them to build our cars,” Donald Trump added. “We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need them for anything.”

Shocking? Yes. But not just for the disrespect shown to our northern neighbors. 

What’s most shocking is our president’s ignorance of economics. While we don’t “need” Canada for any of the things Trump mentioned, we’re better off trading with Canada than not. The sending of “billions of dollars” up north is neither charity nor waste; the gains both sides make are apparent in the voluntary trades themselves. 

It’s as if he thinks if “we” must pay anyone, it should be to ourselves, that is, to our fellow countrymen.

Behind this is that old crank notion, protectionism: “we have big deficits with Canada, like we have with all countries.”

Now, it’s true that Canadians send more raw materials to the U.S. than we send to them, and that we send them more dollars than they send us theirs: that’s what “trade deficit” means. 

But how is this bad for us? 

Trump doesn’t explain. “I look at some of the deals made and I say, ‘Who the hell made these deals?’ They’re so bad.”

Mr. Trump identifies no specific trade rules or agreement; he doesn’t say which are unfair, or why; nor does he say who made them. But the trades that pile up to that overall deficit, each was made by Americans and Canadians who thought the deal best for them.

Trump’s seemingly goofy idea of adding Canadian provinces to the U.S. as new states would have one great benefit: more trades with these good people than ever. This belies Trump’s far, far more troublesome notion that we need nothing from Canada. We need everything. As Canadians do.

That is, freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

Exit Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, Covid, vaccines, economy

America’s far-​north (and far-​left) autocrat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is resigning.

His resignation may pertain to the fact that opposition parties promised to vote no confidence in Trudeau’s Liberal Party when the Canadian parliament meets in March.

Associated Press says that critics complained of Trudeau’s efforts to “strike a balance between economic growth and environmental protection,” i.e., sacrificing economic growth to environmentalist hobbyhorses. 

Critics have many other complaints too.

What’s the worst of Trudeau’s conduct and policies? Tough call. But his treatment of the Canadian truckers who launched a Freedom Convoy to protest Canada’s ludicrous COVID-​19 mandates has to be near the top of the list. Among other measures, Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protestors — and even those of some supporters.

GoFundMe cooperated by blocking donations to the truckers and even, briefly, declaring that blocked donations would not be returned to donors who failed to make a special appeal but would instead be redistributed to “credible and established charities.” The outrage over the planned theft, even if perfectly in sync with Trudeau’s hooliganism, was too great, though, and GoFundMe reversed itself.

Trudeau is also one of many Canadian politicians who leapt into inaction as the Chinese Communist Party tested the limits of its ability to interfere in Canadian elections and politics and engage in transnational repression. I have discussed the problem here; and the sister site of Common Sense, StopTheCCP, has touched on it here and here and here and here.

Trudeau’s exit is good news for Canada and the free world. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly

Crime Fighters Give Up

Canada, Toronto, police, crime, prevention

Fight crime — give criminals all your stuff today!

This isn’t my view. But it’s the apparent view of some — I hope not many — Canadian police officers.

At a recent public meeting about coping with crime, a Toronto police officer told people that to reduce the chances “of being attacked in your home, leave your [car key] fobs at your front door. Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

To reduce the risk to you personally, give up in advance.

Are you following the reasoning? Because I’m not. And I am very disinclined to leave my car keys and cash and my Taiwanese history library in a heap near the front door to buy off home invaders.

Instead, perhaps everybody in high-​risk neighborhoods should install a trap door in their vestibule, rigged in such a way that anybody who forcibly breaks into the home is immediately dropped into a vat of starving piranhas.

AIER’s John Miltimore sees an “obvious problem” with the policeman’s helpful advice. The problem is that he is asking people to encourage burglary and theft, to make it “easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.” If a lot of people follow the advice, this would tend to increase car thefts.

It all reminds Miltimore of the movie Robocop and its crime-​ridden landscape. “There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence.…”

To avoid dystopia, let’s defend ourselves instead.

And our cars. And car keys. And …

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom judiciary too much government

The Vaxxers’ War on Truckers

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, vaccine, Covid

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.

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crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs

Sikh Freedom First

Sikh Soldiers, unity, God

If I get gunned down in a hail of bullets … well … who done it?

The genocidal Chinese Communist Party, furious at my new website, StoptheChinazis​.org? 

Perhaps. But what about the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India? 

I’m a member of the Punjab Referendum Commission, an international group advising and monitoring the non-​governmental referendums being organized among the worldwide Sikh diaspora by U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice. Recently, I stood at the entrance of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, outside Vancouver, where Canadian intelligence agencies say agents of Modi’s government assassinated Sikh leader and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, back in June, spraying him with 30 bullets. 

Then, last week, U.S. prosecutors indicted an Indian national for, according to The Wall Street Journal, “working with an Indian government officer to pay a purported hitman $100,000 … to murder a prominent advocate” on U.S. soil.

“The court filing did not name the victim,” The Washington Post reported, “but senior Biden administration officials say the target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-​based Sikhs for Justice.…”

My mouth’s suddenly a bit dry; I’ve been on the same stage as Mr. Pannun several times. 

There’s a long history of political unrest and violence between Sikhs in the Punjab region and the central Indian government … leading today to roughly one-​fourth of Sikhs living outside of India. 

What can we do? Well, though I take no position on whether — YES or NO — the Punjab region should secede from India, I very much like that Sikhs for Justice is resorting to the opposite of violence — democracy — by asking Sikhs around the world to cast their vote.

If they dare.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency insider corruption international affairs

Northern Disclosure

Justin Trudeau, airplane, China, India, Sikh

Oh, Canada. 

My wife and I visited our northern neighbor just a week ago, while its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was stuck in India … with plane trouble.

“Trudeau’s presence at the G20 summit … came against a backdrop of tensions between his government and host India over Ottawa’s handling of rightwing Sikh separatists,” U.K.’s Guardian reported. “New Delhi accuses Ottawa of turning a blind eye to the activities of radical Sikh nationalists who seek a separate Sikh homeland in northern India.”

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I served as a member of the Punjab Referendum Commission, an international group with some know-​how about direct democracy. We’re advising and monitoring the referendums being organized around the world by U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice. Nearly a million Sikhs live in Canada.

Mr. Trudeau should wear the Indian government’s scorn as a badge of honor, of course, for upholding the Sikhs’ basic rights to speak out in his putative free society. 

But that’s not the only billion-​being nation-​state brouhaha this scion faces; Trudeau’s Liberal Party controls the Parliament but “after months of demands from opposition parties” just finally agreed to an official public inquiry into foreign (read: Chinese) interference in their political affairs. 

“Canadian news reports earlier this year, citing anonymous Canadian intelligence officials and leaked classified documents, alleged that Chinese intelligence officials had funneled donations to its preferred candidates,” explains Axios, “all members of Canada’s Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Worse than plane trouble.

I hope Canadians will get to the bottom of it and hold their politicians accountable in ways that we in the U.S. did not 30 years ago when Washington was first awash with Chinese cash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.” 

I’m going to quote an anarchist. 

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-​tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-​protest, anti-​free-​speech, anti-​due-​process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order. 

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

freedom,order, morn

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-​pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-​type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

The California-​Canada Connection

Canada, California, Medical License, consensus, censorship

What do California and Canada have in common, aside from bone-​chilling temperatures?

Well, the fact that they’re trying to chill the discourse of doctors.

In California, a new law empowers medical boards to punish doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-​19. The misinformative nature of a stated view about the pandemic is allegedly proved by the mere fact that it contradicts a putative scientific “consensus.”

Such laws rely on misinformation for their very existence. 

When coping with complex, incomplete, sometimes murky evidence, do scientists and others ever simply disagree, even fundamentally, on the road to scientific “consensus”? Can a consensus ever be wrong? Does anybody ever hew to an asserted consensus out of fearful desire to conform rather than honest intellectual agreement?

To ask these questions is to answer them. But let’s move on.

To Canada — and the case of Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose professional status in the country is being jeopardized because of medical and/​or political views, like opinions criticizing “climate change models,” “surgery on gender dysphoric minors,” and Canadian officials who threatened “to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protesters.”

Stated on social media, these opinions are apparently incendiary enough — i.e., candid enough — to vex Canada’s powerful medical censors.

According to Peterson, the Ontario College of Psychologists demands that he submit to “mandatory social-​media communication retraining” because of his views. If he doesn’t comply, he may lose his license.

Such repressive impulses, he says, are “way more widespread than you might think.”

It’s cold outside.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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