Poll: Democrats Support Suspending Rule of Law to Crush Truckers

Sixty-five percent of Democrats told the Trafalgar Group so, anyway. I am not sure Americans fully understand how grave a violation of what we would ordinarily consider to be the rule-of-law this Canadian move is. They just know that they hate the truckers, and wanted to see them crushed, and the government crushed them.

Well, for now it has, although if the truckers decide to fight they could easily blockade several parts of the Canadian economy that would compel the regime to surrender fairly quickly. Canada remains extremely vulnerable to this strategy, which is partly why the government is willing to throw out their whole legal tradition and basic Constitutional protections in order to oppose it. 

Yet it is important to grasp just how severe a violation of the rule-of-law this move really is. The Canadian government has ordered banks to freeze the bank accounts of people merely suspected, not proven, to have supported the truckers in any way -- without a court order or any due process, and barring you for suing for damages over it. Some bank accounts have been frozen for donations as small as $40. For the price of dinner out, the government is willing to see you lose your life savings and home if you can't pay  your mortgage. I can't think of any crime involving $40 that isn't a misdemeanor, not a felony.

Those small, deadly donations were not made to a terrorist organization, either, but to a perfectly legal registered nonprofit. So it is not just that the donors are being punished for a crime without due process: they are being punished for behaving in a perfectly legal way, and without due process.

Even for those who engaged in civil disobedience and therefore did break some law, the laws involved are minor violations:  literally they are honking too loud, or parking a motor vehicle in an unauthorized location, or refusing verbal police instructions. Civil disobedience does normally require that you accept the lawful punishment for your choice to express discontent in an extralegal manner, but these are '30 days if convicted at trial' offenses, not 'held-without-bail and then ten years in prison' offenses under the laws that actually existed at the time of the actions. Ex post facto laws have been created, and are being retroactively applied, which is a violation of ordinary Anglo-American principles of justice (it would be formally unconstitutional here).

So your life can be destroyed by ex post facto laws that targeted perfectly legal behavior, or what were minor violations of civil order at the time they were done, on suspicion alone and without due process. These powers are totalitarian in scope, in other words: they presume not only to govern according to the law, but to change the law after the fact to fit whatever they decide they wanted to govern. All aspects of life, including those currently strictly legal, fall under this scope.

Those are only the broad-brush strokes of the challenge. There are other worthy issues, for example, the fact that actually violent protests in Canada from left-wing actors are never punished in any similar way. In three weeks of trucker protests, they committed not one single assault or battery or violence of any kind; in that environmentalist protest, they set wildfires and destroyed construction equipment, then attacked responding security and Royal Canadian Mounted Police with axes. Equality under the law, then, is also being violated here.

Ultimately this a much more serious challenge to the Western tradition of liberty just because it's being done in a once-secure Western state. If bedrock principles like the rule-of-law, no ex post facto laws, and equality under the law can be simply set aside in Canada, it can happen anywhere.

There is also a pragmatic danger. Venezuela did this kind of thing once Chavez took power, and declined from being one of the richest and happiest nations on earth to an impoverished tyranny. Canada could follow a similar route, even with all its wealth -- Venezuela also had wealth, and still sits atop massive oil reserves. Not only would that be terrible for Canadians, Americans must consider that we could end up with failed or failing states on both of our long land borders. Although taking on qualified truck-driver refugees would actually benefit our economy, the costs of Canada falling into a Venezuelan-style death spiral will be bad for us as well as them. 

So reflect carefully, everyone, on just how serious this action by Trudeau really is. It is not just winning a political fight: it threatens the death of some of the most basic principles of our whole political tradition.

8 comments:

E Hines said...

One small bit: the Canadian truckers (or American truckers, if it comes to this) don't need to blockade any parts of the Canadian economy to severely impact the government. Doing that, anyway, would likely have little effect on the Trudeau government; he, like Putin, doesn't care about that sort of cost. Trudeau only cares about cost to himself or to his personal power.

Where the Canadian truckers could have serious impact on the Canadian government would be if they stopped delivering anything at all to the Federal government and to any of the Provincial and Territorial governments that continue to support the Federal government.

On the larger matter, Canadians can counter, if cumbersomely, the bank moves by shifting to cash transactions (after first withdrawing their value from the banks--so far, the bank lockdowns are limited to a "few" truckers and their supporters).

Canadians then could expand their actions by generally ignoring the Federal government's moves and diktats, forcing the Federal and Provincial police to act, and thereby expose the long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object [that] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, as another decision paper put it, that render the Trudeau administration utterly illegitimate.

Eric Hines

David Foster said...

This is interesting:

"The largest difference in approval versus disapproval took place among 25 to 34-year-olds. In that age group, 100% of respondents disapproved of Trudeau’s tactics."

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-poll-majority-of-democrats-back-trudeaus-crackdown-freezing-bank-accounts-of-truckers

It's not clear from the way the above appears in context whether this 100% number is for this age rage in the entire sample, or only among non-Democrats. Can't find the actual crosstabs anywhere, though.

jabrwok said...

Although taking on qualified truck-driver refugees would actually benefit our economy

The current, illegitimate, administration in DC will do nothing that would benefit the US economy. "The worse, the better" appears to be their operating principle.

Grim said...

Mr. Hines:

"...he Canadian truckers (or American truckers, if it comes to this) don't need to blockade any parts of the Canadian economy to severely impact the government... Canadian truckers could have serious impact on the Canadian government would be if they stopped delivering anything at all to the Federal government and to any of the Provincial and Territorial governments that continue to support the Federal government."

Yes, and short of blockades they could also simply strike broadly. No nation could survive a trucker's strike if it were broad and popular among truckeres.

Of course, this is also why the government is coming down so hard on anyone who supported them -- even a $40 donation to a legal 501(c)3 nonprofit. If you stop working, you still need to eat. Being supported by crowdfunding means that the strike could potentially be sustained for a long time. Canada is terrified of this movement, and for good reason: it has the power to destroy the government, and nonviolently, just by staying home.

Thus, it is very important to keep them needy and without any support from those who agree with them. They must be so close to the edge that they can't afford not to work.

raven said...

" They must be so close to the edge that they can't afford not to work. "

That is a dangerous calculation. There is no one so dangerous as a person who simply "does not give a fuck" anymore. Once concern about consequence is completely gone, up to and including ones own death, things can really go sideways fast.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

"They just know that they hate the truckers, and wanted to see them crushed, and the government crushed them."

That is so. It has become a frightening development to increasingly see principles tossed for tribal victory.

Texan99 said...

It's been many since I began to see the Democratic Party as the primary home of authoritarianism in the U.S. It puzzles me enormously to see D politicians harp constantly, and apparently with good effect, on the supposed danger of authoritarianism from the GOP.

Just recently the D tactics seem to be pushing some voters out of the party, and some of them actually into the arms of the GOP, but it's a difficult process. There are an awful lot of voters who either can't bear to give up on the Democratic Party, or can't bear to identify as Republicans even if they do--so they throw their votes away on risible third party candidates. Maybe the problem won't be solved without a far more momentous realignment of both parties into two completely new ones.

E Hines said...


short of blockades they could also simply strike broadly.

This, though, would be counterproductive--they'd likely lose the support of the general population, as those folks would be hurt worse by a general strike than would be the men and women populating the government, against whom they're truly protesting.

Canada is terrified of this movement....

One small quibble. "Canada" is not at all terrified of the movement. In this context, nation is a construct, as is government. Who is terrified of the movement are the latter-day liberals (wholly akin to 18th century conservatives--monarchists) who sit in the Canadian House and Senate and in the PM's mansion. It's illustrative of that terror that Isabelle Jacques, an Assistant Deputy Minister in the Canadian Finance Department, now is assuring Parliament that "banks had begun unlocking accounts on Monday and that no more finances would be locked up."

Because a next step (if not the next step) could have been a run on the banks by too many Canadians pulling their money out and going over to a cash economy, rather than an electronic one. The banks had already begun expressing their worries about such runs.

Eric Hines