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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard not to see financial repression as another likely motive. Make it impossible for someone to operate without a bank account, then use the banking system as a mean to retaliate against your political ideas like Trudeau did already. It’s similar to covid apps being used to prevent protests in China.

There is a worrying return to authoritarianism everywhere. People forget that none of their rights would have been won if there wasn’t any wiggle room in the system, for people to do illegal things before they get accepted as legal, like smoking pot, being gay, being pro-democracy, etc.

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The freezing and debanking of protestors is a shockingly dangerous precedent.

You are literally removing people's functional access to food, water, and shelter.

Wait till you hear the rest of what Israel does to certain protestors...

Canada used to be a normal country though, even kind of nice, not an apartheid state. Expectations are different.

Canada has a very dark history of violence against natives. The reputation of "being nice" is a recent media myth.

Virtually every country has a dark history of violence. And Canada doesn't even crack the top 10 there. I meant it within a reasonable frame of reference, like say 90s and 00s.

they used counterterrorism laws (which is of course ridiculous), and threatened protesters that they'll lose their corporate license (so they can't work commercially as truckers).

going after financing was surprisingly efficient, but not giving them the convenient out of "sure continue protesting without the trucks" was dumb.

The police, by ignoring the threat and letting the truckers set up, left Trudeau's hands tied here. Towing a semi in a very crowded downtown core is difficult with the drivers help. With a driver that does not want to be towed, the truck would stay there for much longer. And doing that with several hundred trucks, many of whom are the biggest customers of the towing companies, means towing them after they were allowed to set up would take months. The protestors had been told to remove their vehicles - telling them they could protest if they gave up their semis was not gonna happen.

I think we can agree that it left us with 3 things: a dangerous precedent, a reminder to everyone that a centralized, cashless society has downsides, and a protest that ended after a week instead of being dragged on for months.

I don't understand the towing argument. If the driver/owner does not cooperate get a different driver, trucks are not that special, right? (Do they have so so so extra ignition locks?)

Police not doing their job. Yep, and Ottawa did not want to rock that boat too much. (I can imagine they had some initial guess as how quickly they will give up, so it could be that that's why the police was lenient with them. But who knows.)

While from a power and monopoly on violence perspective going after finances is very similar to using other means to get people to do this or that, but it sets a very bad precedent. Even if it's the easier way compared to doing the hard work of separating the truckers from their trucks one by one, and removing the trucks.

Very old school socialist punishment for dissenters. Usually followed by assigning dirty, dangerous jobs to the oppossition.

I don't disagree with your message but why does everyone frame what happened in Canada as a protest? From afar it looked more like a campaign of societal disruption that was paid for by people all around the world with the "protesters" requesting donations.

Is this referring to BLM, or the truckers? Seems to apply to both.

It applies to all "protesters" who take donations for ongoing protests that negatively impact society at large.

Protests and societal disruptions aren't mutually exclusive. And the "foreign funded campaign" argument is such a trope to discredit any protest, and reminds me more of something the Kremlin would say to justify destroying dissent. It was really scary to see canadians suddenly pretend that donations from america are proof that the protestors were foreign agents. Canadians have had no problem sending donations south for hundreds of years, and vice versa.

But hey, that rhetoric came directly from the the only government in the western hemisphere to have suspended constitutional rights (and because of a protest) since probably World War 2... So it's not exactly surprising.

(There was also this obsession to call them terrorists, again textbook dehumanizing/discrediting tactics. And for the record, I'm not a pro truckers and voted for trudeau twice. Yet the way the government dealt with the situation was literally disgusting.)

Under the Soviet Union, the same logic was used against Protestant Christians (my parents experienced this) as many had “ties” to the United States.

Yes and it's honestly why I'm so vocal about the whole situation, even in real life. It just made me so uncomfortable how the events unfolded and how quickly the narrative switched to justifying (and even cheering!) for people to be stripped of their rights. I don't really care about antivaxxers but as a muslim and an immigrant, it just made me realize just how fast events like these can unfold and how easy it was to normalize batshit insane rhetoric against a minority (in the numerical sense, I'm not saying antivaxxers are a protected class)

We went from calling them conservative grandma killers (at least that was somewhat related to their claims), to nazis, to terrorists and finally foreign backed insurrectionists. In 2 weeks. Let's hope the public opinion doesn't ever turn against Muslims as much too then, because now I have a glimpse of just how irrelevant any of my rights would suddenly be.

> Protests and societal disruptions aren't mutually exclusive.

Agreed. Though the difference with the Canadian Truckers vs all other protests was that it was ongoing 24/7 and they were advertising for donations with the promise of continuing the protest.

Sure the government could have done nothing and let them do their thing but the voter backlash against them would have grown to include not only the people protesting but the people affected by the protests. So the government used all the tools in the toolbox to stop it including propaganda. It's kind of wild though to think that the rest of the country or world can essentially extend their political influence to an issue in a geographical area where they have no "skin in the game".

Personally I think it was stupid of the truckers to block key trade routes. Did they not realise that politicians receive donations both officially and non officially (revolving door) from wealthy people who own businesses? Why not just announce an ongoing strike? My guess would be they didn't have the numbers or they weren't willing to make a financial sacrifice for their cause.

getting an abortion, 40 hour work weeks, having health insurance, ...

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