There Are No Good Reasons to Suspend Civil Liberties

There are no good reasons to suspend civil liberties, only pathetic excuses reeking of political opportunism and expediency.

Of course I’m alluding, among other things, to our government’s quixotic attempt to legislate a virus away, with the results that we know; even China gave up on that, long after every other country admitted defeat under public pressure. What I was more concerned about at the onset, however, was the kind of precedent it would set, and three years down the road my predictions are proving correct.

Perhaps the most telling warning sign of a government’s authoritarian tendencies is attempting to censor communications, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s bill C-11 is about to do just that by granting the CRTC the power to regulate online user-generated content such as Youtube videos. Make no mistake, this would bring Canada on par with countries like China and Iran, however much our government denies it.

This would have been unthinkable before the pandemic. But Ottawa has grown deathly afraid of protests and dissenting views since the Freedom Convoy, to the point of resorting to wartime measures in order to suppress them—another development that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior. Censorship of course becomes compelling given social media’s instrumental role in fuelling protests.

And of course it’s giving other public officials ideas, such as Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s brazen attempt to take away public educators’ bargaining rights by invoking the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause, a move even Trudeau disavowed as an unintended consequence of his own initiatives. Ford had to back down after unions threatened him with a general strike, and later because of a stinging judicial defeat. That too would have been unthinkable just a few years ago; workers’ rights are considered a cornerstone of democracy and attacking them the hallmark of a rising dictatorship. But then Ford’s full-scale onslaught on the Greenbelt and his stance on strong mayors running the show with minority rule expose his broader dictatorial tendencies.

Quebec’s Premier François Legault’s attack on religious liberties—and racial minorities—by outlawing public servants’ display of religious symbols, with a very broad interpretation of them going as far as banning the hijab, is another example of a premier emboldened by watching other governments getting away with it. Quebec has invoked the notwithstanding clause before to protect its language, but it’s questionable whether it would have gotten away with it this time if not for the pandemic’s opportune timing shifting the debate away from civil rights abuses.

Then there’s Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith’s Sovereignty Act which seems to give a new spin to the term ‘quixotic’ as an ill-fated attempt to turn the province into the Premier’s own queendom by granting he cabinet near-dictatorial powers. She had to back down on that particular part, but just a weeny bit. While she may have been emboldened in her opposition to Ottawa’s tendencies instead, the result was to be the same on paper: rule by diktat. Especially since she could never articulate a proper rationale for the bill in the first place. But who cares? She was merely riding the wave of autocracy that swept the world in the aftermath of the pandemic.

To come full circle, Ottawa has now decreed that every arrival from China must be tested for COVID, of course in an abundance of caution, against the advice of its own experts and likewise unable to articulate a rationale for its actions. Of course this latest measure is most likely to fuel racism against the Chinese, already made acute by pandemic restrictions and vitriolic rhetoric against the ‘Chinese virus’; that is probably the government’s very intent, as I simply cannot imagine another. Why not? The Trump administration pulled the same one with Title 42, ostensibly to keep asylum seekers from reaching the US in a blatant xenophobic fashion, invoking COVID as an excuse.

So let’s call suspending civil liberties the hypocrisy that it is, always about carrying out some unconscionable agenda or another, regardless of the excuses being invoked to justify it—or lack thereof.