Polling whether rights should be suspended is dangerous. I know nothing of Canadian law, but in the US if 2/3 polled said a peaceful protest should be broken up by the military. The response should condemnation and reassertion of our unalienable rights.
This is not a peaceful protest. There have been multiple documented assaults on the street and of people in the service industry. There were several attempts to burn down residential buildings full of people. The protestors have violated injunctions against making noises at volumes that are harmful to people's hearing, and depriving people of sleep.
That’s it? That many people are there and this is the rampant violence? Lol. This is tame as hell. We’re you clutching your pearls this much during the violent BLM protests where people actually died and buildings burned to the ground with bodies later found inside?
I’ve been a lurker for many years, but felt I needed to make an account to counter you here.
What about X or Y is not a valid response to this argument. You can have no public opinion on antifa or BLM in another country to have the opinion that activity in your own community is not okay. We can compare this to BLM or antifa, but we can also compare BLM or antifa to the Arab spring or French revolution to say that they’re relatively peaceful too.
The fact is this entire thing has been horribly covered by the media.
There are a lot of groups and factions involved in the protest. The main leadership group is organized (and fundraised) by Canada Unity, and their original demands were to overthrow the democratically elected government to install themselves as government and rule through the senate and governer general. You can look that up in their original MOU on the way back machine.
The means of the protest was to park heavy equipment and harass the citizens of downtown Ottawa (via keeping them awake 24/7 with train horns, arguably a form of warfare) until the federal government capitulated to demands. This is essentially the “I’m not touching you, but my hand is directly in front of your face” form of harassment. Later that evolved into blocking border crossings, which is explicitly illegal and explicitly under the criminal code listed as not an acceptable form of protest.
The complications of this issue are confounded by the fact that more than half the donated funds are foreign funds to a protest that was deemed an illegal action.
I personally support the spirit of the protest (i.e. the vaccines should be optional for most jobs and the vaccine mandate should be relaxed) but not the tools they are using, in particular blocking a vital bridge and the honking shenanigans.
I personally have no problem in expressing a nuanced point of view or accepting that I got something wrong. Truth is a very elusive concept. And I rather learn than argue.
The person I was replying to however is aggressively partisan in his opinions. And while it's true that my comment wasn't a proper rebuttal, it does address his lack of credibility for arguing a one sided view of the world.
The only reason for the act is because of the illegal blockades which is affecting essential services, goods and livelihood of local business and citizens.
A peaceful protest cannot hold people hostage by blocking their access to essential services and goods, and trapping them in.
If the protest stopped doing that, then it's fine to continue as long as it wants.
You can't have a very small minority get its way by simply holding others hostage to their services and goods. The point of a protest is to be heard and get people to consider your cause, not to consider your demands through extraction.
I've watched 40 hours of multiple live streams at night and in the morning, it is peaceful. I have gone to events myself and it was peaceful. A lot of families brought kids there, doubt you'd see so many children if it was not peaceful.
It's like saying that locking you inside your house is peaceful, because all I did was put a big truck in front of your door which didn't physically harm you.
You're only including direct physical violence as part of your "not peaceful" definition. But blocking major road arteries and bridges that are essential to the economy and to bringing in/out services and goods to the people of Ontario is also an act that a peaceful protest wouldn't do.
I'm very pro-protest by the way. Including for people I disagree with. A few broken windows, some small contained fires in trash cans, and just the general side effects of having a thousand+ people in a small city space all protesting I'm absolutely okay with, even a few little breakout fights, I still would consider that a peaceful protest.
Blocking major roads using heavy machinery with no alternate route that can meet the needs of the local population, that goes beyond peaceful in my opinion.
P.S.: I've also watched live streams, I always do, I've seen BLM protests first hand for example, and all media always exaggerate a protest, so I'm the last person who'd believe the headlines at first. In this case though, I know even the truckers probably don't think it's that big a deal that they have their trucks blocking roads, but given the already stretched crisis of the Pandemic, the second order effects on supply is a big deal. Please keep protesting, but don't block those major roads. Move to smaller roads even if you want.
They know what's coming, when they decided to block those roads, they knew they didn't leave people a choice, they are cutting off a supply line, this is beyond protest, it's an attempt to say, if you want your supply back, do what we want. I'm sorry, that's beyond: We won't stop voicing our concerns and expressing our rights to protest.
A strike is a bunch of people refusing to work, not a bunch of people blocking access to unrelated essential services. They do things like overwhelm the 911 service with spurious calls and circling their trucks around schools. This is not a strike, this is outright terrorism. Someone will die (or already has) because they don’t have access to an essential service.
When one side shows up to block a street to draw attention, and the other shows up to loot a Best Buy to get a new PlayStation, it’s not really an apples to apples.
Funny how you seem to have forgot the highway shutdowns that BLM pulled in multiple cities, buildings burnt down with bodies later discovered inside. Yeah totally way more chill than some scary trucks idling in a street.
