Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse (opens in new tab)

All: if you're going to post in this thread, please make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

That includes not posting flamewar comments, not calling names, not crossing into personal attack, not being snarky, and not using the thread for political or ideological battle. You can make your substantive points without any of that, and we want curious conversation here.

I've seen a lot of commentary about the fact that the Emergencies Act provisions "expire" automatically after 30 days, and include "safeguards", ergo there's nothing worry about. People getting hung up on the text of the bill forget that it's merely an Act of Parliament, and thus can easily be amended or replaced via a simple majority vote.

What played out last night indicates that none of these checks and balances really matter in a parliamentary system where the nuclear option of a non-confidence vote (and subsequent election) can be invoked to force any MPs with qualms to vote along party lines.

It's easy to see what will happen next, based on this government's track record: they will introduce amendments to the Act, or new legislation containing only the provisions they would like to make permanent, and once again proclaim that voting against the amendment will result in a new election.

They will probably also use it as an excuse to ram through their "Online Harms Bill", i.e. internet censorship, targeted at "misinformation" (disagreeable speech) and, many suspect, independent media outlets that the PM despises.

Internet censorship + government-directed financial de-platforming = Canada's near-term future if the situation doesn't change somehow.

Occupy Wall Street was started by a group of organized Canadians and they blocked access to NYSE facilities. OWS was obviously an occupation (it’s right there in the name), but the better question is: was OWS a protest, too? If so, why can’t this be called one as well?

There are generally more parallels between OWS and the truckers than people are willing to recognize, because there’s been a hell of an inversion: if you supported OWS 10 years ago you probably don’t like the truckers today and if you like the truckers you probably weren’t for OWS 10 years ago. There are a handful of Tim Pools that like both, and there are elites that disliked both, but the average person has to do some gymnastics.

All that I ask is that everyone is consistent: if OWS is a protest, then this is too. If you don’t like that Americans funded the truckers, you have to be willing to call out that OWS took place in NYC but formed from a Canadian nonprofit.

> In particular, it was about giving the government of Canada the permanent power to freeze, without trial or legal recourse, all the bank accounts and other assets of anyone it decides was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ in an ‘illegal protest.’

Is this actually true? According to [0] "The Declaration expires after 30 days unless an extension is confirmed within specific timelines by both the House of Commons and the Senate.". I don't see how this would grant the government permanent powers unless the Emergencies Act gets renewed in perpetuity.

[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-justice/news/2022/02/can...

Any power given to government will be abused by them. It's sad that many Canadians support these clearly dangerous and totalitarian actions from their "leader".

Did you notice how "freedom" became a swear word over the last 5-6 years? With all these "muh freedoms", "what exact freedom have you lost?", "freedom of speech don't protect you from anything" it seems like any movement that fights for any "freedom" will be labeled as terrorist/nazi in next few years.

History repeats itself, and I'm sick of it. My country of origin and my country where I grew up, both turned to totalitarian hellholes, and now it's Canada's turn.

This is the risk in protesting. Authorities have never been nice to protestors. Protesting has always carried the risk of assault and the loss of livelihood, wealth, freedom, or life. So before protesting, you need to ask yourself if what your protesting for is worth it.

The state is fucking powerful. After all, the state is the one in charge of checking the state's power. If you piss off enough people, or merely the wrong people, you may discover that your rights only extend so far as other people are willing to protect them. The difference here is that most protestors are punished via ass-kicking, seizure of personal belongings, a few nights being humiliated in a jail cell, and a bunch of fines.

The people whose lives were interrupted by this are pissed off and out for blood. And Trudeau is going to give it to them, and be heralded as a hero while doing so. Especially after the perceived police incompetence in the matter (by failing to dole out the standard ass-kicking-jail-fine punishment).

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any references to any specific incidences or examples of a person having their accounts frozen for simply donating to the protest. Can anyone provide a reliable source of this happening? Since it's the whole point of the alarmism in the article it seems an important thing to establish.

This article https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/02/21/convoy-protesters-b... isn't quite a debunking but certainly throws some cold water on this claim. Although it's not really explicitly claimed in the article that this is actually happening, just strongly implied. I wonder if that is intentional.

I've been very anti-cryptocurrency/anti-blockchain for years now. I'm still skeptical of them (possibly more due to their current implementations and the fanboy-ism that surrounds them), but this absolutely convinced me that we need non-custodial financial instruments. (Maybe that isn't crypto/blockchain stuff, who knows. Physical cash is annoying to deal with, though.)

However, the problem is that you still need to convert this "uncontrollable" currency into fiat currency. At the very least, you need to pay your taxes. But if the governments decide that non-custodial currency is illegal, then everything from grocery stores to web hosts won't risk accepting anything but government-approved currency. Sure, we'll have black markets where people can convert things to fiat, but those will be expensive and risky.

So I still don't see blockchain as a savior here. If the government can give themselves the power to freeze people's custodial assets on a whim, they can also make it illegal to deal in bitcoin or whatever. And I'm skeptical that this is the kind of issue that can be boiled down into easy-to-understand bits in order to generate a lot of public support. Blockchain already has an image problem, being full of "bros" and undeserved millionaires/billionaires. Most people are not going to put their political support behind this without a huge shift.

Emergency powers that suspend fundamental civil liberties without judicial oversight are, in a democracy, only justifiable in times of an existential crisis of the nation. One can hardly see how the trucker protests qualify as such.

Very disappointing to see.

This sort of stuff just has the same effect that the mandates did in the first place.

Congratulations, now you've made it such that it would be _irresponsible_ for me to not keep a large amount of savings outside of the financial system.

It may seem stupid to state that such a practice will not be limited to a particular circumstance. It seems equally stupid to assume it would be.

This is a new precedent. Expect it to proliferate, with virulence.

I'm sure others will be addressing the subject of social credit.

I live in the downtown area of Ottawa and found the protests to be annoying but respected their right to do so. It's strange seeing the hyperbole that pops up in the news contradicting what you can see with your own eyes outside.

I have to go through police checkpoints to get to my home. I'm dealing with political divisions ripping through my friends and family right now. I'm scared of how this is pushing us to more centralized, unchecked, and unjust power in the hands of government.

The people cheering for this are the ones who will be camplaining when it gets used against all future protests.

Canada has dropped many rankings on the democracy scale.

This article is an eye opener. A liberal modern economy de-platforming their citizens without due process. Gross.

Tweeted this the other day:

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like that much to require that:

> A person must not participate in a public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace by: > > (a) the serious disruption of the movement of persons or goods or the serious interference with trade; > (b) the interference with the functioning of critical infrastructure; or > (c) the support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property.

I think it's possible to respect that approach, but still be mad as hell and get your point across.

Another reason to have decentralisation in financial system. I'm not for cryptocurrency but this excess in democratic state is exactly what brings people to alternatives, ie Bitcoin.

5th grade social studies lesson from 2080:

By the 2020’s western state power is no longer exercised through employment of a physical law enforcement corps. The middle class is sufficiently controlled by a centralized financial structure, but the social protection capacity of the state has become overwhelmed by both the numbers of the underclass and the wealth of the overclass. This is often presented as an intentional political position, but it should be easy to see that this was just a pragmatic alignment with the inevitable reality. A pandemic pushes the state into a position to assert absolute power, and a series of protests arise to test that power, while investors enter a mania for alternative financial systems. The differences in response to the various threats to state power raise the ultimate question of this learning unit: Is there such a thing as a power based on and constrained by the consent of the governed, or is a government only legitimized by its ability to exert and retain power in the form of control over the governed?

There are communities that live without access to the banking system already. Many of them do so from a philosophy of independence (in the old sense, they wish to limit their reliance on things outside their community).

Certainly some of their methods will be of great interest to the unpersons, perhaps some of the philosophy will be more appealing too.

For anybody wondering about the meme terms wordcel and shape rotator that appear later in the article:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-defi...

The same exact thing happened after 15 July 2016 (Erdogan staged a coup attempt on his own) in Turkey. To put it simply it was the beginning of the genocide of peaceful Gulen movement members or anyone who had any kind of connection with them in the past.

The bank that I had account + credit card was shut down (stolen by Turkish state) with the decree laws. My brother had an additional account in another bank. That bank terminated his account and credit card using decree laws as a reason, no court order.

We lost our jobs, money and freedom in a single night. Our company was shut down by the state without due process. My relatives, friends and colleagues got jailed and tortured by Turkish police and soldiers. We got fired and almost none of us were able to get employment (we got work permits revoked) code 36 (fired due to decree laws) is on social insurance records. University degrees of some of us cancelled by the decree law. There are thousands of things I want to tell but it is too long. At the end my brother became a permanent resident in Canada via asylum and I am an asylum seeker in Greece (decisions take way long here). My relatives and friends still in jail in Turkey.

To put it simply, what Canadian government is planning right now is a clear way to go for genocide. Killing people economically is a part of genocide method (don't ask me where I know it).

Update: Bank accounts are already being unfrozen.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...

My wife just asked me: haven't the truckers now basically been proven right?

I mean: in the end what they were really protesting against were measures they did find totalitarian (btw I'm double vaccinated and so is my wife, out of our free will, so we're not anti-vaxx).

The measures taken do not look like something normal to do in a democracy: invoking an emergency act and using laws meant for war times... Aren't some people who were not sympathetic to their cause now going to think they were right all along?

I'm asking because I just explained the situation to my wife and her first reaction was precisely what I mentioned: "so they were right all along?"

I didn't look at it from that angle but there are obviously people who will.

See https://lois-laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-24.501/ this is covered by existing laws. Proceeds involved in crime. () If it can be proven that those fund were not involved in criminal activity, the courts will unfreeze. (or at least that's how it's intended to function).

() that's up to courts, not public opinion. I'm in the public.

its hard to fathom the case being made by canada's government that the 100,000 people who donated are accomplices to a crime. statistically, they would otherwise have to be average law abiding citizens. there was no violence in ottawa, no deaths; certainly nothing remotely worthy of invoking the emergency act; you can watch for yourself, if you can find feeds that werent deleted, many of the 170 arrests. they were mass arrests. i believe the most severe charge facing the organizer is conspiracy to commit... mischief. further, i have never witnessed such blatant, shameless propaganda combined with censorship in a western country. are there academic theories about why this is happening that don't veer into tinfoil hat territory?

Anyone reading this should realize that these "protests" have been completely beyond what's reasonable. They're fighting against sensible measures made to protect the population, and have made absolute idiots of themselves.

They don't have any respect from the average Canadian. They are an incredibly disruptive, sometimes violent group, with no respect for basic human decency. I know people who were forced out of their homes because you go crazy after that much continuous honking.

I don't have the slightest shred of pity for anyone involved in these "protests", or anyone who supported them. It's a disgrace that strong action wasn't taken more quickly.

Pardon my ignorance, absent any guise of protest, can people be paid to block bridges and roads? Is there any other legal mechanism to combat organized disruption?

Very lengthy read, but worthwhile and stayed out of the politics well.

Wow the libertarian tech bros are really coming out in force on this one.

Unlike in the US, most Canadians are okay with trading some small freedoms for the greater good.

As a Canadian I have no problem with these power being used in this extreme case. After three weeks of occupying downtown Ottawa with the demand that the government be dismantled, they are no longer peaceful protesters. They are a group trying to remove a democratically elected western government. It makes perfect sense that funding for a group like that (a terrorist group) would be blocked.

I am glad that unlike the US, Canada is not allowing the far right to operate unimpeded. Homegrown right wing extremism is a growing problem in the US and is spilling over into Canada (Thanks Facebook) and I’m happy to see it being put down in this small way.

If anyone is interested in the strategy I took to try defend New Zealand from being torn apart by the Convoy protests, I've documented it here.

https://www.facebook.com/thomas.minnee/posts/101600891209174...

Kinda scary use of power in a democracy

Well, as I said before — another day, another answer to "What is Bitcoin good for?"

This time the answer is "It's useful to make your mortgage payment when one of your family members donates to a trucker protest that successfully applies pressure to the Canadian government, which then 'freezes' your bank account until the emergency legislation expires."

The quoted tweets point out that legal pornographers and legal gun shops have been subjected to similar, but less transparent, measures.

Of course the law says it applies equally to cryptocurrencies, but it really only applies to intermediaries. The point of cryptocurrencies is that they make you independent of intermediaries; you can possess your own coins instead of lending them to a bank or a stockbroker. This is part of what the Nunchuk response quoted explains.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408611

I'm also concerned about the long term implications of using the Emergencies Act, particularly in the future when we have a majority parliament where attaching confidence wouldn't be as much of a mitigation. I'm okay with the use of it in this scenario since it's possible to connect the sources of money from foreign actors and some of the activities connected with the protests, particularly when the government committed to follow on with legislation that would serve the same function as what they're using in the act.

One comment about the article tho: Quoting Ezra Lavant immediately destroys the credibility of the author due to his obvious and direct connection to misinformation and over all general grift by attaching himself to right wing causes. There are lots of strong credible sources that could back up the argument of government overreach with the EA, but Ezra is not one of them.

This all madness started when Canadian government couldn't admit that with omicron vaccine mandates no longer make much sense. Even if they played some role previously, previous infection is functionally equivalent to vaccination. Most provinces had already implemented the plan to revoke them and many other countries are dropping them as well.

This proves again and again that when the government implements a policy that is not based on science, the outcomes are very very bad.

I'd like to be wrong, as I'm asserting this based on the logic of a known playbook for these kind of things. If I am not wrong, it would be evidence they are using that playbook with some implied ends in mind.

The provisions expire ostensibly in 30 days, but what's pretty clear is there are exceptions for certain protests, and what I forsee occuring is there will be provocative so-called "counter protests," backed by the governing parties, which will result in "random" violence (some staged, some provoked), that will be used as a further pretext to extend and augment the powers into an indefinite emergency. (remind me: April 15, 2022) The playbook is a mix of colour revolution tactics with Arendt's description of totalitarian movements using absurdity and chaos via other movements to neutralize people at large.

In case you were still catching up, it would now seem uncontroversial that the Emergencies Act is at least how far they are willing to go to implement digital identity via vaccine passports. Simply, the Canadian government has metastasized. I'm not neutral at all, but I like to constantly reassess whether my views have predictive power.

The outs I see are:

a) tension fizzles and cools off, vaccine passports get pulled as promised in 2 weeks, act expires in 30 days, life goes back to mostly normal, pandemic finished like it is in dozens of other countries around the world.

b) narrative changes and now that truckers are moved, no reason to pull back vaccine passports anymore, and some excuse is contrived to maintain them - permanently divided society results.

c) government becomes histrionic and starts escalating reaction to imaginary threats, adds additional powers, starts purging society groups from financial system and employment - result is decade+ of strife.

d) government just says fuck it, Queen dies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and potentially France form a new post-national bloc with only nominal local rule, similar to the EU, but mainly operated by a transnational committee that implements a social credit system to engineer a utopian experiment that accepts a lot of casulties.

These are coarse grained scenarios, but as poles for likely outcomes, they're the waypoints I'm using. Most people think option a) is plausible, but I think their hope obscures their ability to see incentives. Option b) is a verifiable bet in a couple of weeks, and if b, then it's a quesiton of whether it's in service of c) or d).

I wonder what the reaction would have been if Trump had done something similar during the "mostly peaceful" protests about 18 months ago?

There wasn't much/any honking, but there was some looting and burning.

Canadians have so far been majority in favor all measures, arbitrary or not, to wreck the convoys.

The critics of the use of the Emergency Powers have been derided as cranks, and this is in line with the majority opinion of Canadians

Canada simply does not have a heritage of individual rights. Their country, their rules.

At best this is unsupported personal opinion and at worst a slippery slope fallacy.

There will be many history books written on what has happened and is about to happen. I hope I get to read them, maybe I will even write one.

This will be an impossible subject to wade through due to the very charged reality of what has gone down. Preconceived perceptions are broken.

I respect Bill Maher's opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i72czkSUsM

I respect Jimmy Dore's opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNnGdv8ceM

One of the best objective timelines I have read on this subject to date: https://quillette.com/2022/02/21/the-ottawa-trucker-protest-...

The less we discuss and upvote this the longer it will stay on HN front page.

I'm seeing a lot of terrible takes by Americans, and a lot of Canadians shaking their heads. It seems theres a lot of disinformation crossing the border.

* Quoting Ezra Levant is just... hilarious. His news rag has been banned from so many press events.

* We JUST had a federal election where these protesters could have made their point. Instead they chose to strangle the capitol and borders across the country.

* Over a thousand donors to the Convoy have been linked to the Jan 6th capitol demonstration and attack.

* 3 weeks of disruption to the nation's capital with horns blaring overnight, arson attempts, and weapons seizures is not "non-violent". There is not much difference between storming a capital and strangling one. Police and Military members were involved in creating supply lines and creating an occupation. And there were plans to block airport cargo terminals. The economic impacts across the nation are in the billions of dollars.

* The freezing of finances IS NOT retroactive, thanks to our charter, meaning if you donated to the convoy before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, you won't be targeted. The only accounts were “individuals and companies suspected of involvement in illegal acts,” such as “influencers in the illegal protest in Ottawa” and vehicle owners and drivers “who did not want to leave the area impacted by the protest.”

* It's hard to see the act as a tyrannical overreach if it can be challenged in court and has a public inquiry

* Police didn't enforce the law which is why the feds needed to intervene. The public inquiry (required by the act) should reveal why police forces were unable to shut down these protests earlier, and where the money was flowing. If donor lists are to be believed, there was a significant amount of foreign funding into this operation, as well as members of the public service.